I'll Outlast You! Time is the one thing I have in abundance!

Lu Changsheng paced back and forth in agitation, his claws carving deep white gouges into the solid rock.

He was incredibly conflicted.

In this Primordial Land fraught with peril, he knew better than anyone the consequences of stagnant cultivation.

The Dragon-Phoenix Tribulation was already brewing, and the great beings out there could blast him into dust with a casual wave of their hands.

With his meager cultivation at the early stage of the Heavenly Immortal realm, he didn't even qualify to be cannon fodder in this great tribulation.

Although his Great Dao Merit could keep him from dying, every time it was triggered, it consumed his origin.

If he didn't seize this moment to raise his cultivation, he would eventually exhaust all the merit he possessed when he encountered trouble he truly couldn't avoid.

Lu Changsheng had calculated this account very clearly.

"But... how am I supposed to pull this thing out?"

Lu Changsheng returned to the edge of the abyss, crouched down, and furrowed his brows tightly.

To test the power of that half-section of beast horn, he had rummaged through his own pile of junk and dug out a broken Post-Heaven Refined Iron Flying Sword.

Although the flying sword was damaged, it was at least made of sturdy material capable of withstanding a full-force strike from an ordinary Heavenly Immortal.

"Go!"

Lu Changsheng formed a spell seal and pointed his finger.

The broken flying sword transformed into a streak of light, heading straight for the black beast horn at the bottom of the pit.

His goal was simple: he wanted to use the flying sword to touch the beast horn and see exactly how much force it would rebound with.

However, the scene that followed made Lu Changsheng's heart go completely cold.

"Hiss—"

When the flying sword was still three zhang away from the black beast horn, it was as if it had slammed into an invisible wall of fire.

It didn't even make a crisp clinking sound.

The moment the sturdy Post-Heaven Refined Iron touched the circle of materialized destructive aura radiating from the perimeter of the beast horn, it was instantly decomposed, melted, and finally vanished into a wisp of black smoke without a trace.

"What the..."

Lu Changsheng gasped, a fine layer of cold sweat instantly breaking out on his forehead.

"It can vaporize a Refined Iron Flying Sword without even touching the physical object?"

He looked down at his own golden wings, then back at the beast horn at the bottom of the pit.

He had no doubt that if he had lost his head earlier and actually jumped down to pull that beast horn out with his bare body, the Great Dao Merit within him would have poured out like a bursting dam to resist that level of destructive will the moment he made contact.

He feared that before he could even pull the beast horn out, a tenth of the foundation he had saved up over five thousand years would be burned away!

One-tenth of his origin!

That was more painful to him than being killed!

"No, no way. Using my physical body to pull it is definitely suicide; I can't do a losing business deal."

Lu Changsheng decisively abandoned the idea of brute force.

He plopped down on the edge of the cliff, rested his chin in his hands, and fell into deep, prolonged contemplation.

He sat there.

For fifty whole years.

For the creatures of the Primordial Land, fifty years was nothing more than the time it took to take a nap.

But for Lu Changsheng, with his modern soul constantly calculating gains and losses, he didn't know how many billions of brain cells had died during these fifty years.

He had deduced countless plans.

Use a rope to lasso it and pull it up? No, any magical treasure rope would be vaporized upon getting close.

Flood it with water?

No, the destructive will on this beast horn could even distort the void; ordinary water would simply turn into nothingness as it approached.

Go outside and find a scapegoat to pull it for him?

Even worse!

Not to mention there were no living creatures nearby, even if there were, how could he let someone else share a piece of the pie for a project of such heaven-shaking merit?

Over the course of fifty years, the weeds around Lu Changsheng grew and withered, withered and grew.

Until one day in the fiftieth year.

A gentle breeze blew by, picking up a withered yellow leaf that drifted slowly and landed on the tip of Lu Changsheng's nose.

"Achoo!"

Lu Changsheng sneezed, jolting awake from his deep contemplation.

He rubbed his nose, a ferocity and resolve never before seen erupting in his eyes.

This ferocity was not directed at anyone else, but at his own personality, which was stingy to the extreme.

"I refuse to believe that a living man can be stifled by a drop of urine!"

Lu Changsheng leaped up, hands on his hips, and cursed at the beast horn at the bottom of the pit.

"You're nothing but a dead object! A scrap of bone that's been dead for who knows how many eons! Even when your master was alive, they were hacked to pieces by great powers, so what are you doing playing the big shot in front of me!"

"Push me too far, and I have plenty of ways to deal with you!"

After the outburst, Lu Changsheng took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.

Since his physical body couldn't touch it and his magic treasures couldn't get close, there was only one method left—the clumsiest, most time-consuming, but also the safest one.

"Constant dripping wears away the stone; an iron pestle can be ground into a needle. The one thing I have in abundance in this life is time!"

Lu Changsheng gritted his teeth. "You have a destructive will, don't you? You can pollute the earth's veins, can't you? Then I'll use arrays to grind away your will layer by layer! I'll drain your Sha Qi dry!"

Having made up his mind, Lu Changsheng did not hesitate.

He retreated a dozen or so yards to a relatively open patch of flat ground.

"Clang!"

"Clatter!"

Lu Changsheng began to frantically empty out his life's savings.

He dumped everything from his Storage Jade Box onto the ground in one go.

In an instant, the previously empty ground was piled high with a small mountain of broken array disks, tattered magic treasures, and unknown ores.

This was his entire net worth, gathered bit by bit over five thousand years like a scavenger within a ten-thousand-mile radius of the Nameless Low Mountain.

"This is the remains of the Green Wood Demon-Suppressing Array..."

"These are the flags for the Post-Heaven Water-Fire Grinding Array; although two are broken, they can still be used if I fix them..."

"These are fragments of the Taiyi Purifying Water Basin, still containing a trace of purifying power..."

Lu Changsheng sprawled amidst the pile of junk like a crazed miser, counting and sorting them piece by piece.

He was going to set up a grand array.

The most complex, massive, and painstaking array he had ever laid in his life.

"A single array certainly won't be enough to suppress the destructive will of this beast horn. So, I must use nested arrays, stacking array upon array to grind it to death!"

In the years that followed, the edge of this once-dead Sha Qi Pit turned into a bustling construction site.

Lu Changsheng transformed into a tireless grandmaster of arrays and a manual laborer all in one.

When materials ran short, he used his own weak true fire to forcibly smelt useless scraps of magic treasures into crude array bases.

When spiritual power nodes wouldn't connect, he bit his finger and used a trace of his meager essence blood as a catalyst to force the array patterns to communicate.

Five hundred years.

One thousand years.

One thousand five hundred years.

Time slipped away.

In this near-maniacal process of setting up the array, Lu Changsheng seemed to forget the passage of time, hunger, thirst, and even his own identity as a cultivator.

He was covered in mud and filth, his golden feathers matted with dust, looking like a wild pheasant that had crawled out of a mudslide.

But his eyes were terrifyingly bright.

Two full thousand years!

In these two thousand years, Lu Changsheng had not cultivated his magic power for a single day; all his energy had been poured into this array.

As the final spirit stone serving as the array eye was slammed into the groove in the ground, "Hum—!"