Starting to Create a Gu Recipe From Scratch

In the endless dimness, Long Xuan jolted awake from a dream.

"Where is this?"

He looked around in a daze, his brow tightly furrowed.

What appeared in his line of sight was a cluttered bedroom, and the air still carried a moldy smell.

When his gaze swept across a bronze mirror on the table, a handsome youth of fifteen or sixteen appeared in his vision.

He quickly realized that he had transmigrated, and right after, a flood of unfamiliar memories rushed into his mind, further confirming the guess in his heart.

This was a strange world similar to an immortal-cultivation world, featuring alchemy, artifacts, arrays, talismans, beast taming, insect taming, sword taming, puppets...

And the youth was a Gu cultivator who practiced the path of insect taming, living in a region populated entirely by Gu cultivators. The people of this region acquired powerful strength by raising and refining Gu.

The so-called Gu meant placing different kinds of spirit insects in a vessel and making them slaughter each other.

Given time, there was a probability of giving birth to a stronger, new insect species.

A new insect species born through this method was called a Gu insect, and Gu insects could not reproduce and could only be obtained through the method of Gu refinement.

Depending on the types and quantities of spirit insects in the vessel, there were countless ways to combine spirit insects.

Different combination methods would give birth to different Gu insects with varying shapes, strengths, and bizarre abilities.

Yet they could be roughly divided into two categories: one was larger in size and used for external combat, called external Gu.

The other was smaller in size and could parasitize inside the Gu cultivator's body, growing on the nourishment of the Gu cultivator's body and feeding back various magical abilities to the Gu cultivator, enabling them to vomit fire and summon lightning; this kind of Gu insect was called an internal Gu.

Some internal Gu were harmful and of no benefit to a Gu cultivator, so they could be thrown into an enemy's food. Because of their tiny size, they were hard to detect and completely impossible to guard against, and those who were poisoned would often have their internal organs eaten and die from the Gu.

It was worth mentioning that many combination methods could not refine any Gu at all, and the combination methods capable of refining powerful Gu species were even fewer and farther between.

Gu cultivators recorded the combination methods that could refine Gu on paper, and these became the permanently passed-down Gu recipes.

A Gu recipe was the foundation for a lineage to endure and prosper, and the most important thing for a lineage.

Every lineage regarded them as precious treasures and kept them strictly confidential.

Therefore, it was extremely difficult for an ordinary person to learn a Gu recipe.

And the original owner happened to be an ordinary person from a humble background, doing odd jobs in a medicine garden to earn a meager income, with completely no opportunity to learn Gu recipes.

The original owner was also named Long Xuan, with a lowly status and having lost both parents since childhood, yet he unexpectedly carried a golden finger from birth, perfectly fitting the standard protagonist setup.

Only, in the original owner's view, this golden finger was quite useless and served no purpose at all, so this protagonist had always been poor and destitute, never growing stronger because of having a golden finger.

Seeing this part of the memories, Long Xuan could not help but frown.

Could a golden finger actually be useless? It was simply unheard of, and after reading countless novels, it was the first time he had ever heard of such a thing.

This protagonist's golden finger was not a system; it was simply the ability to see the growth progress of all things.

This was its only function—merely being able to see it, without being able to alter it. Apart from visually seeing a number, it had no use whatsoever.

At first glance, it really wasn't very useful. Spiritual beasts and spirit insects could have their growth assessed through their size, and human herbal medicines also had many ways to determine their age, so he really didn't need him to distinguish them.

Long Xuan wore a pensive look. According to the description in the memories, this was a pair of eyes that could see the growth progress of all things, and this "all things" referred to everything in the world, not limited to living creatures.

It seemed that all living and inanimate things that could be called by a name had their progress visible.

However, using "growth progress" on inanimate objects wasn't very vivid, and Long Xuan preferred to use a modern term, collectively calling it "progress" as it was more vivid.

An ability to see the progress of all things was considered useless by the original owner, but Long Xuan did not think so. In his view, this ability still had a huge space for development.

There were no useless golden fingers, only useless hosts; it all depended on how wild the host's imagination was.

As a transmigrator, the one thing he didn't lack was imagination, and soon many magical ideas appeared in his mind.

He hurriedly got out of bed and walked over to the table, took out paper and pen from the drawer, and quickly wrote the two large characters "Gu Recipe" on the paper, then wrote down a material called Ghost Spider underneath.

Things truly went as he expected, and progress immediately appeared on the paper, except that the progress transitioned from the original representation of one or two tenths into the numeric representation of his previous life. Evidently, the manifestation of the golden finger was primarily based on the host's cognition.

At this moment, a string of numbers reading 1.5% appeared in his vision.

Long Xuan was thoughtful. According to his conjecture, an incomplete recipe also counted as a thing, and naturally its progress could also be seen.

The progress of a Gu recipe obviously represented the degree of incompleteness of the Gu recipe.

The more complete the Gu recipe, the higher the progress; the more incomplete the Gu recipe, the lower the progress.

Yet a Gu recipe incomplete down to only 1% was still called an incomplete recipe, and a Gu recipe incomplete down to just a single material was theoretically also called an incomplete recipe.

So it was simple: how difficult could it be to forge an incomplete recipe with only a single material left?

He only needed to casually guess an incomplete recipe whose progress he could see, and then continue writing down materials he thought were correct afterward.

If the progress vanished, it meant the guess was wrong, so he would erase it and change to another material.

If the progress increased, it meant the guess was correct, and he could continue guessing downward.

When he guessed all the way to 100%, it meant he had successfully guessed a Gu recipe.

He had deliberately written an insect species from his previous life on the paper just now, yet he could still see the progress, which indicated that the golden finger's criteria for judging an incomplete recipe included theoretical existence.

In other words, he could create Gu recipes from scratch through this golden finger, inventing new Gu species that had never appeared in this world before.

With no trial-and-error costs and Gu recipes researched solely through pen and paper, creating his own Gu recipes was merely a matter of how long he ground away at it for him.

Living two lives left him with a formidable soul and soaring comprehension, which, coupled with his past life's identity as an entomologist, made him confident that he could utilize his prior knowledge and wild imagination to develop extraordinary Gu recipes, ones more than sufficient to shine brightly in this world.

Long Xuan was extremely excited at that moment, brimming with anticipation for the future. After studying his cheat for a bit longer, he finally pushed open the door and walked toward the medicine garden managed by the original owner.

Refining Gu required a not-insignificant amount of startup capital, and this medicine garden might just become his first pot of gold.

The medicine garden belonged to a Gu master surnamed Long, whom outsiders all addressed as Old Long.

Old Long hailed from a Gu master lineage named the Long Family, and he had been dispatched to station himself in this village called Great Stone Village to fend off incursions from spirit beasts and raids by demonic cultivators and bandits for the settlement.

In return, the price Great Stone Village had to pay was more than half its grain, including meat and eggs.

It was unknown just how many similar villages were controlled by the Long Family.

In this world, Gu masters were utterly incapable of farming. This demographic only ever cultivated unceasingly, engaged in no production whatsoever, and possessed voracious appetites, leaving them to draw their food sources entirely from mortal villages large and small.

Gu master lineages provided shelter to mortal villages, while mortals supplied food to the Gu master lineages.

The more powerful a Gu master lineage, the more mortal villages it controlled, and wars between Gu master lineages also encompassed the plundering of mortal villages.

Great Stone Village was a large settlement with a population reaching three thousand, having taken on its current scale due to the presence nearby of the sole trade fair in the Far Western Lands.

Because it lay closest to the Long Family, it consequently became one of the protected villages under their jurisdiction.

The Long Family ranked among the seven strongest Gu master lineages in the Far Western Lands, and no one dared to provoke them, meaning Great Stone Village had never once experienced a raid.

Such a secure environment was precisely what satisfied Long Xuan.

Old Long's medicine garden spanned a vast area and cultivated over a hundred varieties of spirit herbs.

The grades of spirit herbs ranged from low to high, categorized from the first to tenth grades, beyond which still existed only earth and heaven grades, which only endured within legends.

Though Old Long's medicine garden was large, everything planted within it consisted of first-grade spirit herbs, the lowest among spirit herbs, and their types were exclusively floral spirit herbs. The garden was permeated with various rich floral fragrances that refreshed the heart and mind.

Following the instructions within his memories, Long Xuan picked up a bucket of green liquid and stepped into the medicine garden; the green liquid was fertilizer.

The fertilizer for spirit herbs was far from being stinking feces; rather, it was this green liquid that required purchasing from a commercial guild, one that Long Xuan preferred to call Ripening Liquid.

Applying Ripening Liquid to spirit herbs sufficed to shorten the growth period of spirit herbs by half.

Long Xuan harbored a deep interest in this Ripening Liquid, bringing his nose close to sniff repeatedly as if wishing to research its exact composition.

If ordinary Ripening Liquid could produce such heaven-defying effects, wouldn't advanced Ripening Liquid be capable of shortening spirit herbs with a thousand-year maturity period down to a mere hundred years?

He firmly believed that as long as he knew the formula for this bucket of Ripening Liquid, he could draw inferences from it and definitely use his cheat to research the formula for advanced Ripening Liquid.

"Pity, if only I had a microscope," Long Xuan shook his head, sighing as he spoke.

He did not know how to manufacture a microscope. If he wished to acquire a similar capability, he could only achieve it by creating his own Gu recipe, and within this world where everyone practiced Gu sorcery, he also deemed it necessary to research a Gu insect possessing this ability.

Long Xuan studied it for another moment, but aside from deducing that the progress displayed on the Ripening Liquid might represent an expiration date, he reaped no further gains. He thus abandoned his research, preparing to wait until the Microscope Gu was successfully made before revisiting the matter.

Long Xuan reined in his focus, ladling out a spoonful of Ripening Liquid and pouring it over a spirit herb named Moonlight Flower, whose growth rating immediately shifted from the original 17.1% to 17.2%.

Glancing at it, Long Xuan proceeded to pour a second spoonful, and the progress swiftly climbed from the original 17.2% to 17.3%.

When he continued by pouring a third spoonful, however, the progress showed not the slightest change.

Long Xuan looked thoughtful, a second function of his cheat rising in his mind. To verify his inner suspicions, he proceeded to continuously pour three spoonfuls of Ripening Liquid onto a different species of spirit herb; this time, the progress exhibited three changes.

Only when he attempted to pour a fourth spoonful did the progress cease its ascent.

Just as I thought?

Long Xuan revealed a look of excitement.

According to Old Long's instructions, he needed to pour once every seven days, administering three spoonfuls to each spirit herb.

Yet viewed now, the dosage lacked precision, and perhaps the time intervals between watering lacked accuracy as well.

Spirit herbs differed in species, so the dosage of Ripening Liquid naturally varied accordingly.

Some spirit herbs possessed high absorption rates and might require three spoonfuls, while others might suffice with a single spoonful—excessive amounts would instead lead to a failure to tolerate rich nourishment.

Substantial discrepancies would naturally arise in watering times as well; some required application every seven days, while others might necessitate it every five days.

Merchants could only estimate approximate dosages, making the occurrence of waste inevitable, and in order to turn a greater profit they might even exaggerate the amounts needed.

Meanwhile, Long Xuan was fully capable of tailoring his methods to each subject, rendering the dosage for every single spirit herb precise to the ultimate degree, and achieving a seamless connection in fertilization schedules.

What did this signify? It meant that without affecting yields, he could embezzle a portion of the Ripening Liquid.

It also signified that under his limit cultivation, the maturity speed of the spirit herbs would far outstrip expectations, and within a certain timeframe their yields would naturally surpass former levels.

According to the original owner's memories, Old Long used the spirit herbs in the medicine garden to pay wages, requiring only the timely delivery of a prescribed quantity of spirit herbs every set period, while any excess yield served as his salary.

The harder the original owner worked, the more he earned, whereas if he slacked off and caused yields to fall short of the stipulated amount, he would have to make up the difference out of his own pocket.

Yet Old Long cared solely for results rather than the process, leaving the original owner to toss and turn the medicine garden however he pleased. He had never once visited the garden to inspect it, and remained in seclusion year-round.

With things set up like this, wouldn't this first pot of gold simply materialize?

A smile surfaced at the corners of Long Xuan's lips. His cheat truly possessed no useless aspects; far from being useless, this cheat was somewhat heaven-defying.

The cheat was not a system, but rather the ability of a bug.