Drawbacks of the Golden Finger

At this moment, Long Xuan finally understood that refining Gu did not require rigid adherence to convention, nor did the materials have to be insects. He could add materials ordinary people would never dare imagine.

This greatly raised the upper limit of the Gu path.

Inspired by the cow's eye, Long Xuan quickly thought of the eagle's eye as well. Eagle eyes could also magnify objects, and were even sharper, making prey ten kilometers away seem close at hand.

If he added eagle eyes to the Gu recipe, perhaps it would grant him the ability of clairvoyance.

After he wrote the words "eagle eye," the progress on the Gu recipe changed again rather than disappearing. This proved that he had succeeded once more...

What followed was a long stretch of grinding away at the Gu recipe. Every day, aside from hiding at home and working on it, Long Xuan went to the far-west market to gather the recipe's materials, picking up overlooked bargains along the way and amassing wealth like mad.

He had already realized that the cost of his second Gu insect would likely be an astronomical figure.

This revealed one drawback of the golden finger.

After all, many Gu recipes used the same materials.

So how could the golden finger determine which Gu recipe Long Xuan's incomplete recipe belonged to?

Therefore, the golden finger judged it according to the Gu recipe requiring the greatest number of materials.

The number of materials recorded in every Gu recipe differed. Some had more, some had fewer; a completed Gu might require as few as nine spirit insects, or as many as tens of thousands.

In this world, a Gu insect's quality was determined by the quality of its spirit insects. As for how powerful an ability a Gu insect could carry, that depended entirely on the number of spirit insects.

A Gu insect's strength depended on quality; among those of the same quality, it depended on the number of materials.

But this was not absolute. A Gu insect with more materials did not necessarily mean it was stronger than one with fewer materials, and such cases were quite common.

This was because Heaven's standards for judging strength differed from humanity's. For instance, the illumination technique of the Light Gu insect seemed weak in Heaven's eyes—but after someone developed it further, was it still weak?

Besides, Gu insects could be practical or impractical, combat-oriented or non-combat-oriented.

There were no shortage of examples where a Gu insect refined from tens of thousands of materials carried an impractical auxiliary ability and possessed no combat power whatsoever.

In ancient times, the spiritual energy of heaven and earth had been abundant, with spirit insects carpeting the land. People could research Gu recipes without counting the cost. The Gu recipes of that era were each longer than the last, stretching beyond all bounds.

Legend had it that some Gu recipes were an entire book, with materials numbering in the hundreds of millions. No Gu-refining vessel could possibly contain them.

When refining such Gu, one could only use mountains, rivers, and basins as vessels—or even heaven and earth themselves.

When the Gu was completed, heaven and earth would abruptly change, strange phenomena would descend, and terrifying scenes would unfold.

The Gu insects born from those lengthy recipes all possessed power to destroy heaven and earth; some could even carry the power of space and the power of time.

Thus, if the golden finger judged by the greatest number of materials, then the number of materials in the Gu recipe Long Xuan created could be anything. It might even have seven digits after the decimal point in its progress.

But people generally had one trait: greed.

Even knowing full well that a lengthy Gu recipe would consume vast amounts of time and resources, and that the resulting Gu insect might not be stronger than one made with fewer materials—

Long Xuan still gritted his teeth and persisted in pursuit of perfection.

At this point, he did not even dare imagine how many spirit stones this seemingly somewhat long Gu recipe would cost him.

Fortunately, the reputation of the Little Strong Gu he had developed had already begun to spread.

When Li Erniu dueled his mortal enemy, he successfully slew his foe through a fighting style of trading injury for injury.

At the same time, his enemy's final strike pierced straight through his heart. Yet Li Erniu simply refused to die.

This incident caused a huge sensation for a time. The Little Strong Gu became completely famous because of that battle, blazing with popularity.

Overnight, the Little Strong Gu became widely known. From then on, its sales channels were thoroughly opened, with an endless stream of people coming every day to trade for it.

If Long Xuan had not feared others discovering the secret that his Gu-refining success rate was one hundred percent, he truly would have wanted to sell them in unlimited quantities every day.

By selling Little Strong Gu, occasionally picking up bargains at street stalls, and occasionally finding bargains at gambling stone shops, he earned so much that his coffers overflowed, enough to support the consumption of his second Gu recipe.

Of course, he conducted every transaction while disguised. Each time, he covered his face and assumed a different identity.

Although the market had rules against murder and treasure-snatching, and no one would target him as long as he did not carry valuable treasures, his naturally cautious nature still made him decide to play it safe.

Time flowed on. Before he knew it, two years had passed. He was still the same as before, at the early Spirit Gathering stage; his cultivation had barely increased at all, and he had become completely numb to it.

Fortunately, he could live forever. If aptitude was lacking, time would make up for it.

Long Xuan believed that sooner or later, he would stand at the pinnacle of the world. He remained quite optimistic about his future.

Speaking of immortality, although his cultivation aptitude was astonishingly poor, he was a heaven-sent genius when it came to cultivating life-nourishing techniques.

In just two short years, he broke through two levels in succession, reaching the twelfth layer of the "Longevity Scripture." His lifespan surged by two hundred years.

Thus, even after two years had passed, he still looked like a boy under eighteen, frighteningly young.

With his total lifespan increased, the time it took for him to mature naturally lengthened in equal proportion. This troubled him greatly as well.

As for his research into the new Gu recipe, since he had not spent his time deducing the "Longevity Scripture," he managed to grind it to completion after two years.

Although he had long been mentally prepared for the possibility that the Gu recipe might require many materials, the appearance of a recipe with over three thousand materials still gave him a fright.

Other Rogue Cultivators generally needed only several dozen materials to refine Gu, with even the more extravagant recipes requiring only a few hundred. His several thousand types of materials were simply terrifyingly numerous.

Among the thousands of materials required by this Gu recipe were many costly high-grade spirit insects. The Gu-refining cost alone was already an astronomical figure.

A rough estimate put it at several million spirit stones—a price so outrageous it was absurd.

Over the years, he had frequented the market, using the golden finger to unearth who knew how many treasures there, selling who knew how many Little Strong Gu insects. Only by scraping together funds from every possible source had he finally gathered enough spirit stones for one set of materials.

But this Gu refinement had also essentially emptied all his assets. Overnight, he was back to square one.

Long Xuan's heart ached terribly.

After spending such an enormous sum and investing so much time, if the completed Gu did not carry a good illusion technique, his mentality would utterly collapse.