Lu Changsheng paced back and forth restlessly, his claws carving deep white gouges into the hard rock.
He was hopelessly torn.
In the perilous Primordial Land, he knew better than anyone what would happen if his cultivation stalled.
The Dragon-Phoenix Tribulation was already brewing. The powerful beings out there could turn him to dust with a casual slap.
With his measly early-stage Heavenly Immortal cultivation, he didn't even qualify as cannon fodder in this great calamity.
Great Dao Merit could keep him alive, but every time it activated, it consumed his essence.
If he didn't hurry and raise his cultivation now, then when he ran into trouble he truly couldn't escape, the merit he'd accumulated would be drained sooner or later.
Lu Changsheng knew exactly how the numbers added up.
"But... how am I supposed to pull this thing out?"
Lu Changsheng went back to the edge of the abyss and crouched down, his brows knitted tightly together.
To test the Half Beast Horn's power, he'd dug a broken Post-Heaven Refined Iron Flying Sword, snapped in half, out of his junk pile.
The sword was battered, but at least its material was sturdy enough to withstand a full-force strike from an ordinary Heavenly Immortal.
"Go!"
Lu Changsheng formed a hand seal and pointed.
The broken sword shot off in a streak of light, heading straight for the black horn at the bottom of the pit.
His goal was simple: he wanted to use the sword to touch the horn and see just how hard it would hit back.
But what happened next chilled Lu Changsheng to the bone.
"Fsssh—"
Three zhang away from the black horn, the flying sword slammed into what seemed like an invisible wall of fire.
It didn't even make a sharp clang.
The moment the hard Post-Heaven refined iron touched the ring of tangible destructive force radiating from the horn, it was instantly broken down and melted, then turned into a wisp of black smoke and vanished without a trace.
"Holy crap..."
Lu Changsheng sucked in a breath, a sheen of cold sweat instantly beading across his forehead.
"It vaporized a refined iron flying sword without even touching it?"
He looked down at his pair of golden wings, then at the horn at the bottom of the pit.
He had no doubt that if he'd gotten carried away and actually jumped down to pull out the horn with his bare body, the moment he touched it, the Great Dao Merit within him would have poured out like floodwaters bursting through a dam as it resisted that level of destructive will.
He'd probably burn through a tenth of the fortune he'd saved over five thousand years before he could even pull the horn out!
A tenth of his essence!
That would hurt worse than being killed!
"No, no. Pulling it out with my bare body is suicide. I'm not making a deal that leaves me in the red."
Lu Changsheng decisively abandoned the idea of using brute force.
He plopped down on the cliff's edge, propped his chin in both hands, and sank into a long meditation.
He stayed like that for a full fifty years.
To the creatures of the Primordial Land, fifty years was no more than a quick nap.
But to Lu Changsheng, a modern soul whose mind was filled with calculations of gains and losses, those fifty years had cost him who knew how many billions of brain cells.
He worked through countless possible solutions.
Lasso it with a rope and haul it up? No. Any magic-rope treasure that came close would be vaporized.
Drown it? No. The destructive will on the horn could twist even the void. Ordinary water would turn to nothing as soon as it approached.
Find someone outside to take the hit and help pull it out? Even worse!
For one thing, there wasn't a living creature anywhere nearby. And even if there were, how could he let someone else take a cut of a project this drenched in heavenly merit?
Over those fifty years, the weeds around Lu Changsheng grew and withered, withered and grew again.
Then, one day in the fiftieth year,
a breeze swept by, lifting a yellowed leaf and carrying it lazily down onto the tip of Lu Changsheng's nose.
"Achoo!"
Lu Changsheng sneezed and jerked awake from his meditation.
He rubbed his nose. Suddenly, an unprecedented ferocity and resolve flashed in his eyes.
The ferocity wasn't directed at anyone else. It was aimed at his own miserly nature.
"I refuse to believe a living man can be stumped by a damn piss!"
Lu Changsheng sprang to his feet, planted his hands on his hips, and swore at the horn lying at the bottom of the pit.
"You're nothing but a dead thing! A scrap of bone that's been dead for who knows how many epochs! Your master got chopped up by the mighty ones when he was alive, so what are you doing here acting all high and mighty?"
"Push me too far, and I've got plenty of ways to deal with you!"
After cursing it out, Lu Changsheng took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down.
If his body couldn't touch it and magic treasures couldn't get close,
then only one option remained: the stupidest, most time-consuming, but also safest method.
"Water wears through stone; an iron pestle can be ground into a needle. The one thing I've never lacked in this life is time!"
Lu Changsheng gritted his teeth. "So you've got destructive will? You can corrupt the Earth Vein? Then I'll use an array to grind your will away, layer by layer! I'll drain your baleful energy dry!"
Once he'd made up his mind, Lu Changsheng didn't hesitate any longer.
He backed away more than a dozen zhang and reached a relatively open patch of level ground.
"Clang!"
"Crash!"
Lu Changsheng began frantically hauling out everything he owned.
He dumped everything from the Storage Jade Box onto the ground in one go.
In an instant, the empty clearing was piled high with a small mountain of battered array discs, broken magic treasures, and unidentified ores.
This was everything he'd gathered over the past five thousand years, picking it up bit by bit like a scavenger across ten thousand li around Nameless Low Mountain.
"This is what's left of the Green Wood Demon-Suppressing Array..."
"These are the flags from the Post-Heaven Water-Fire Grinding Array. Two are broken, but I can still use them after a little repair..."
"These are the fragments of the Taiyi Purifying Water Basin. There's still a trace of purifying power inside..."
Lu Changsheng burrowed through the pile of junk like a mad miser, checking and sorting the pieces one by one.
He was going to set up a grand array.
The most complex, expansive, and painstaking array he'd ever created in his life.
"One array alone definitely can't suppress the horn's destructive will. I'll need a set of arrays, each layered on top of another, until I grind it down to nothing!"
In the years that followed,
the edge of the once-dead Sha Qi Pit became a bustling construction site.
Lu Changsheng transformed into an indefatigable array master and laborer, no less than a bricklayer.
When he ran out of materials, he used his faint true fire to force the useless scraps of copper and iron from broken magic treasures into crude array foundations.
When the spiritual energy nodes wouldn't connect, he bit his finger and used the thin trace of his own blood essence as a catalyst, forcing the array patterns to link up.
Five hundred years.
One thousand years.
One thousand five hundred years.
Time flew by.
In the near-mad process of setting up the array, Lu Changsheng seemed to forget the passage of time, forget hunger and thirst, and even forget that he was a cultivator.
He was covered in mud, his golden feathers caked with dust. He looked like a wild chicken that had crawled out of a landslide.
But his eyes gleamed with a terrifying light.
Two full thousand years!
For those two thousand years, Lu Changsheng hadn't spent a single day cultivating his power. He'd devoted every ounce of his energy to this grand array.
When he finally slammed the last spirit stone, which served as the array's core, into the groove in the ground,
"Vmmm—!"
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