Creating a Gu Recipe from Scratch

Genesis of Self-Created Gu Recipes

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

Where is this?

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

A cluttered bedroom came into view, the air still carrying a musty smell.

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

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

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

And the youth was a Gu cultivator practicing the path of insect-taming, living in a region entirely populated by Gu cultivators. People in this region acquired formidable power by raising and refining Gu.

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

Given time, there was a probability of giving birth to a more powerful 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, varying in shape, strong or weak, with bizarre abilities.

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

The other was smaller in size and could parasitize inside the Gu cultivator's body, growing on the nutrients of the Gu cultivator's body, and feeding back various magical abilities to the Gu cultivator, enabling them to spit fire and summon lightning; this type 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 fell victim to the Gu 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 combination methods that could refine powerful Gu species were even fewer and farther between.

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

A Gu recipe was the cornerstone for a lineage to prosper for a long time, and the most important thing for a lineage.

Every lineage regarded them as treasures and never leaked them to outsiders.

Therefore, it was an extremely difficult matter for ordinary people to learn Gu recipes.

Yet the original host happened to be an ordinary person from a poor household, working as a handyman in a medicine garden to earn a meager income, with completely zero opportunity to learn Gu recipes.

The original host was likewise named Long Xuan, with a humble status and parents deceased since childhood, yet he unexpectedly carried a golden finger from birth, practically a standard configuration for a protagonist.

Only in the original host's opinion, this golden finger was quite useless and had no use whatsoever, so this protagonist had always been poverty-stricken and never grew powerful because of having a golden finger.

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

Could a golden finger still be useless? It was simply unheard of, and after reading countless novels, it was his first time hearing of such a thing.

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

This was its sole function, merely being able to see it without being able to alter it; aside from visually seeing a number, it had zero use.

At first glance, it really didn't seem useful. Spirit beasts and spirit insects could judge their growth status through their size, and human body spiritual herbs also had many ways to discern their age, so there truly was no need for him to differentiate.

Long Xuan wore a pensive look. According to the description in his memories, this was a pair of eyes capable of seeing 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 dead objects that could be called by a noun had their progress visible.

However, "growth progress" wasn't very descriptive when applied to dead objects, and Long Xuan preferred to use a modern vocabulary, collectively calling it "progress" which sounded more descriptive.

An ability to see the progress of all things was considered very useless by the original host, but Long Xuan did not think so. In his view, this ability still had vast room for development.

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

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

He hurriedly got out of bed and walked over to the desk, took out paper and brush from the drawer, rapidly wrote the two large characters for Gu recipe on the paper, and then wrote down a material named Ghost Spider beneath it.

Things indeed turned out just as he expected: progress immediately appeared on the paper, except the progress changed from the original expression form of one or two tenths into the numerical expression form of his past life. Evidently, the golden finger's expression form was dominated by the host's cognition.

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

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

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 to the point of having only a single material was theoretically also called an incomplete recipe.

Thus it became simple: what difficulty was there in forging an incomplete recipe that had only a single material left?

He only needed to casually guess an incomplete recipe whose progress he could see, and then continue writing materials he believed to be correct underneath.

If the progress disappeared, it meant he had guessed wrong, so he would wipe it off and switch to another material.

If the progress increased, it meant he had guessed right, 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 intentionally written an insect species from his past life on the paper just now, yet he was likewise able to see its progress, which showed that the golden finger's criteria for judging an incomplete recipe included things that existed theoretically.

In other words, he could use this golden finger to self-create Gu recipes, inventing new Gu species that had never appeared in this world before.

With zero trial-and-error costs, researching Gu recipes solely with paper and pen meant that creating his own Gu recipes was merely a matter of how long he ground away at it.

Having lived two lives, his soul was strong and his comprehension was high. Coupled with his past-life identity as an entomologist, he was confident that he could leverage his former knowledge and wild imagination to research extraordinary Gu recipes, ones sufficient to shine brilliantly in this world.

Long Xuan was currently extremely excited, full of expectations for the future. After studying his golden finger for a little longer, he finally pushed open the door and walked toward the medicinal herb garden the original host was responsible for.

Refining Gu required a not-inconsiderable starting capital, and this medicinal garden might just become his first pot of gold.

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

Old Long hailed from a Gu cultivator lineage named the Long Family, and he had been dispatched to stand guard in this village called Great Stone Village to fend off incursions from spirit beasts and plunder by demonic cultivators and bandits.

What Great Stone Village needed to pay in return was over half of their grain, including meat and eggs.

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

In this world, Gu cultivators could not possibly farm; this group only cultivated incessantly, engaged in zero production, and possessed ravenous appetites, meaning their food sources could only come from mortal villages large and small.

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

The stronger a Gu cultivator lineage was, the more mortal villages it controlled, and wars between Gu cultivator lineages also included the plundering of mortal villages.

Great Stone Village was a large village with a population reaching three thousand, having taken on its current scale due to the presence of the only market town in the Far Western Lands nearby.

Because it was closest to the Long Family, it naturally became one of their subordinate, protected villages.

The Long Family was one of the seven strongest Gu cultivator lineages in the Far Western Lands, and no one dared to provoke them, which was why plunder had never once occurred in Great Stone Village.

Such a safe environment was precisely what satisfied Long Xuan.

Old Long's medicinal garden was vast, cultivating over a hundred species of spiritual herbs.

The grades of spiritual herbs ranged from low to high, classified from the first to tenth grades, after which there still existed earth-grade and heaven-grade herbs that only appeared in legends.

Although Old Long's medicinal garden was large, everything planted in it consisted of first-grade spiritual herbs, which were the lowest in grade among spiritual herbs, and their varieties were also entirely flower-type spiritual herbs. The garden was permeated with all sorts of rich floral fragrances that refreshed the heart and spirit.

Following the instructions in his memory, Long Xuan hauled a bucket of green liquid as he walked into the medicinal garden. The green liquid was fertilizer.

The fertilizer for spiritual herbs was naturally not foul-smelling dung, but rather this green liquid that needed to be purchased at a commercial guild. Long Xuan preferred to call it Ripening Liquid.

Applying the Ripening Liquid to spiritual herbs was enough to shorten their growth cycle by half.

Long Xuan was extremely interested in this Ripening Liquid, bringing his nose close and sniffing repeatedly as if wishing to research what its components were.

Ordinary Ripening Liquid could produce such heaven-defying effects; wouldn't advanced Ripening Liquid be able to shorten spiritual herbs with a thousand-year maturation period down to a hundred years?

He firmly believed that as long as he knew the formula for this bucket of Ripening Liquid, by drawing inferences from one instance to other cases, he could definitely use his golden finger to research the formula for advanced Ripening Liquid.

Pity, if only I had a microscope. Long Xuan shook his head and sighed.

He did not know how to manufacture a microscope, and if he wanted to acquire a similar ability, he could only do so by creating his own Gu recipe. In this world where everyone practiced Gu implantation, he also felt it necessary to research a Gu insect possessing this ability.

Long Xuan studied it for a while longer. Aside from figuring out that the progress displayed on the Ripening Liquid might represent its shelf life, he gained no further harvests, so he gave up his research and prepared to wait until the Microscope Gu was made before discussing it further.

Long Xuan pulled his thoughts back, scooped out a ladle of Ripening Liquid, and poured it onto a spiritual herb named the Moonlight Flower. Its growth degree instantly changed from the original 17.1 percent to 17.2 percent.

Long Xuan glanced at it, then continued to pour a second ladle, and the progress quickly climbed from the original 17.2 percent to 17.3 percent.

When he continued to pour a third ladle, however, the progress showed zero change.

Long Xuan grew thoughtful, his mind conjuring the second function of his golden finger. To verify the conjecture in his heart, he continued to pour Ripening Liquid consecutively onto a different species of spiritual herb; this time, the progress went through three changes.

He only attempted pouring a fourth ladle before the progress stopped rising.

Just as expected?

Long Xuan revealed a look of excitement.

According to Old Long's instructions, he needed to irrigate once every seven days, pouring three ladles per spiritual herb.

Yet it now appeared that the dosage was not precise, and perhaps the irrigation time intervals were insufficiently accurate either.

The species of spiritual herbs varied, so the dosage of Ripening Liquid would naturally differ as well.

Some spiritual herbs possessed good absorption and might require three ladles, whereas other spiritual herbs might suffice with just a single ladle—too much would instead lead to a condition where they were too weak to tolerate nourishment.

Naturally, major discrepancies would also appear in the irrigation timing; some needed to be watered every seven days, while others might need it every five days.

Merchants could only estimate a rough dosage, making the occurrence of waste inevitable. In order to earn more money, they might even exaggerate the dosage.

Yet Long Xuan could entirely teach students in accordance with their aptitude, perfecting the dosage of every single spiritual herb to the ultimate degree and achieving a seamless connection in the fertilization timing.

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

It also meant that under his limit cultivation, the maturation speed of the spiritual herbs would far exceed expectations, and within a certain timeframe, the yield would naturally surpass the past.

According to the original host's memories, Old Long used the spiritual herbs in the medicinal garden to pay wages. Every period of time, one only needed to punctually deliver the prescribed quantity of spiritual herbs, and any surplus yield would be treated as his salary.

The harder the original host worked, the more he earned; if he was lazy and caused the yield to fail to reach the prescribed quantity, he would have to pay out of his own pocket.

Meanwhile, Old Long only looked at the results and not the process, regardless of how the original host tossed the medicinal garden about. He had never once come to the medicinal garden for an inspection, and remained in seclusion year-round.

In this way, wouldn't this first pot of gold be secured?

A smile appeared at the corner of Long Xuan's mouth. His golden finger truly possessed no useless aspects; not only was this golden finger far from useless, it was somewhat heaven-defying.

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