One month passed in the outside world.
For most Gu Immortals, one month was not long. It was not enough to refine a difficult Immortal Gu, not enough to complete a large blessed land development project, and not enough for a force to change greatly.
But Fang Ming's strength path immortal aperture had a terrifying time flow.
One outside month was thirty-eight months within.
More than three years passed inside Fang Ming's aperture.
During this period, Fang Ming did not waste a single day.
After leaving the collapsing dream blessed land, he immediately entered seclusion. The dream path resources he had seized were placed into isolated storage formations. The dream deer, dream tiger, and dream-touched dragonfish were sealed separately. Dream fog crystals, dream dew grass, illusion flowers, dream moth Gu, dream-touched water, and other materials were sorted by rank and type.
The most important gain was naturally Dream Feather Immortal Gu.
Dream Feather had been copied from Feng Jin Huang's Dream Wings Immortal Gu. Their effects were extremely similar, so the dream path methods Fang Ming had obtained could be adapted much more easily than expected.
However, those methods were not Fang Ming's own memories.
Fang Ming knew the general importance of dream path from the novel, but the novel had never described detailed dream path Gu recipes, killer move structures, or practical exploration methods. He did not know how to build these systems himself.
The real source was Fang Yuan.
Before this, Fang Ming had made a transaction with Fang Yuan. Fang Yuan possessed five hundred years of past-life memory and had sold Fang Ming some dream path development experience. This included several mortal Gu concepts, killer move frameworks, and exploration techniques.
Fang Ming had paid for knowledge.
Now, with Dream Feather Immortal Gu in hand, he finally had the foundation to use it.
Strictly speaking, these killer moves were not self-created. Fang Ming was only adapting the experience Fang Yuan had sold him. Because Dream Feather and Dream Wings were extremely similar, the process was not too difficult. Many parts could be adjusted directly, while others only needed small changes in activation sequence or Gu worm compatibility.
Soon, several mortal dream path Gu appeared in Fang Ming's hands.
Dream Thread Gu.
Dream Shell Gu.
Dream Lantern Gu.
Dream Mist Gu.
Dream Trace Gu.
They were not highly mature Gu worms, but in this era, even rough dream path mortal Gu were precious. Most Gu Immortals had no proper direction at all. They could only look at dream realms like blind men staring into fog.
Fang Ming was different.
He had Fang Yuan's sold experience, Dream Feather Immortal Gu, a powerful soul foundation, and the ability to test repeatedly inside his aperture's accelerated time.
After that came dream path mortal killer moves.
Some stabilized the soul.
Some searched for dream traces.
Some assisted entry into dream layers.
Some reduced the effect of emotional illusions.
Some allowed a limited retreat before dream backlash struck.
A few immortal killer moves were also adapted with Dream Feather as the core.
These immortal killer moves were powerful, but they had one serious flaw.
They consumed mortal dream path Gu.
The Gu worms used in the killer moves did not merely assist activation. They dissolved directly into the killer move's effect. Each exploration consumed them like fuel.
At first, Fang Ming accepted this.
Dream path was underdeveloped in the current era. High consumption was natural.
But after repeated use, his expression gradually darkened.
The consumption was too high.
Far too high.
The number of mortal dream path Gu required for each proper exploration exceeded his expectations. Even with the dream path materials he had stolen from the collapsing blessed land, he could not sustain long-term use.
Fang Ming began to suspect something.
Fang Yuan had not sold him the most mature dream path methods from five hundred years later.
Perhaps what Fang Yuan sold was only an earlier stage of dream path development, something closer to three hundred years into the future. Perhaps the methods were genuinely outdated. Or perhaps Fang Yuan had deliberately kept the best parts and given Fang Ming inefficient versions to slow him down.
This was very much like Fang Yuan.
The transaction had been real.
The knowledge was useful.
But useful did not mean complete.
Fang Ming did not feel anger.
If their positions were reversed, he would also keep the best things hidden.
Still, this meant one thing: Fang Ming's dream path foundation would consume far more resources than expected.
Before this problem fully blocked him, Fang Ming continued exploring dreams.
Dream Feather allowed him to enter many dream fragments scattered around the dream path resources and beasts he had collected. Some dreams belonged to mortals. Some were broken dreams of rank five Gu Masters. Some came from shallow dream beasts. A few were rank six level fragments.
Most were not very valuable.
A mortal dreaming of hunger produced almost nothing.
A rank three Gu Master dreaming of a lost duel could create weak dream material, but it had little use.
A beast's dream was usually only instinct, fear, hunger, and territory.
These dreams could be explored safely with Dream Feather, but they gave no meaningful attainment.
Fortunately, among them, Fang Ming discovered one truly valuable dream.
A rank seven dream.
The dream belonged to a Gu Immortal named Song Chi.
Song Chi had been a formation path specialist. He was not limited to one narrow type of formation. He had studied defensive formations, attack formations, resource formations, beast-management formations, and blessed land environmental formations.
When Fang Ming discovered this dream, he immediately understood its value.
Formation path was extremely useful to him.
His junglefowl food beast formations needed improvement.
His eagle formation was crude.
His factories were still ordinary production chains, not true formation-assisted production grounds.
His apertures were huge, but their development still lacked refinement.
If he could raise his formation path attainment, the benefits would spread across almost every part of his foundation.
Thus, Fang Ming invested heavily into Song Chi's dream.
The first stage placed him before a broken formation platform.
Around him were four elemental altars: fire, wind, water, and earth. Each altar lacked a core Gu worm. The dream required him to refine four elemental mortal Gu, place them in the correct locations, and combine them into a four-element defensive formation.
Fire Element Gu.
Wind Element Gu.
Water Element Gu.
Earth Element Gu.
The refinement itself was not the hardest part. The true difficulty was placement and timing.
If the Gu worms were placed too early, the formation would conflict.
If they were placed too late, the outer pressure would crush the platform.
If one element became too strong, it would devour the others.
Fang Ming failed several times.
Dream Feather protected him from the worst backlash, but failure still consumed soul foundation and mortal dream path Gu. Fang Ming used guts Gu without hesitation.
Ever since his alliance with Fang Yuan, he had never skipped his monthly guts Gu purchase. Even when resources were tight, soul strengthening remained a priority.
This foundation now showed its value.
Feng Jin Huang had Dream Wings Immortal Gu and more practical dream exploration experience, but she was still a mortal. Her guts Gu supply depended on Spirit Affinity House, her parents, internal sect politics, and quota distribution.
Fang Ming was different.
He bought as much guts Gu as a major force and consumed it alone.
His soul foundation was far beyond ordinary mortals.
After many attempts, Fang Ming passed the defensive formation stage.
The dream gave him formation path comprehension.
It was not enough for grandmaster, but it opened the road.
The second stage was much harder.
Four-element attack formation.
The same four elements were used, but the logic was completely different.
A defensive formation emphasized balance, circulation, endurance, and mutual support.
An attack formation emphasized conflict, release, compression, and timing.
Fire had to erupt first, but not burn out.
Wind had to accelerate the fire, but not scatter it.
Water had to suppress the rebound.
Earth had to anchor the formation core and prevent collapse.
This was no longer only about refining four elemental Gu. Fang Ming had to adjust them according to attack formation intent, then place them into exact nodes while the formation was already operating.
This dream was extremely rewarding.
But it was also extremely costly.
Most of the dream path killer moves Fang Ming had adapted from Fang Yuan's sold experience consumed mortal dream path Gu. Every attempt burned through several Gu worms. Some attempts consumed even more.
His newly produced dream path Gu stockpile was depleted rapidly.
When he reached the final step of the four-element attack formation, Fang Ming ran out of the required mortal dream path Gu.
Originally, he had planned to use his two monthly Virtual Refinement chances to refine two new dream path Gu. Those Gu worms would have strengthened his future dream exploration system.
But Song Chi's dream was too valuable.
Fang Ming chose to sacrifice the plan.
He used Virtual Refinement twice inside the dream.
The first use stabilized the wind element Gu when the formation pressure was about to shatter it.
The second use repaired and completed the earth element Gu at the final moment, allowing it to anchor the entire attacking formation.
Fire rose.
Wind howled.
Water compressed.
Earth stabilized.
The four-element attack formation activated.
The dream stage shattered.
Comprehension surged into Fang Ming's mind.
Formation lines.
Elemental balance.
Formation eyes.
Formation flags.
Resource circulation.
Defensive shells.
Attack nodes.
Formation layering.
Hidden redundancies.
Collapse prevention.
Fang Ming's formation path attainment rose rapidly.
Master.
Quasi-grandmaster.
Grandmaster.
When he opened his eyes again, his perspective had changed.
This was his second grandmaster attainment.
Refinement path grandmaster.
Formation path grandmaster.
The value was immediate.
When Fang Ming looked again at his junglefowl food beast formations, he saw many small flaws. The Gu worms were arranged correctly, but some energy flow was wasted. Some feeding cycles overlapped. Some waste-recycling nodes were too crude.
With only slight adjustment, each formation's monthly pure profit could rise from ninety immortal essence stones to one hundred.
Ten stones more per formation.
It sounded small, but Fang Ming had multiple formations. More importantly, this was only the easiest improvement.
Then came the eagle formation.
Before gaining formation path grandmaster attainment, Fang Ming had been satisfied with it. The formation covered a wide region, nurtured eagles, supported gene enhancement, trained eagle groups, and allowed Eagle Sect disciples to interact with them.
Now, when Fang Ming looked at it again, he frowned.
Crude.
The formation was large because he had solved many problems by adding space and materials. It consumed too much land, wasted too much energy in outer circulation, and lacked proper internal layering.
With his current formation path vision, Fang Ming could reduce its size to one-third while increasing efficiency.
Growth time could be shortened.
The average level of eagles could be raised.
Training pressure could be better controlled.
The same resources could produce stronger eagle groups.
But the greatest inspiration came from the factories.
His factories had originally been based on two ideas.
The first was Fang Yuan's stone nest production method.
The second was Fang Ming's memories of Earth's production-chain system.
This allowed him to split refinement and assembly into simple steps. Low-rank Gu Masters repeated one narrow task, lowering skill requirements and increasing consistency.
This was already effective.
But after gaining formation path grandmaster attainment, Fang Ming saw a higher possibility.
Factories could become formations.
Not merely buildings with workers.
Not merely production chains.
True factory formations.
A refinement-support formation could stabilize temperature.
A material-conservation formation could reduce waste.
A safety formation could suppress backlash.
A rhythm-guiding formation could coordinate workers.
A mistake-detection formation could identify flawed semi-finished products before they reached the next step.
With these arrangements, production could increase, safety could rise, waste could fall, and fewer Gu Masters would be needed.
Each factory had previously produced two one-time-use tattoo totems per month.
With formation assistance, this could rise to four.
Ironclad totem production would double.
Tyrannical Crash totem production would double.
Manpower would be freed for other tasks.
Material loss would decrease.
The profit of the entire totem system would rise sharply.
However, compared to these improvements, Fang Ming's most important inspiration still came from dream path.
After repeated exploration, he understood one painful truth.
His mortal dream path Gu consumption was unsustainable.
The methods Fang Yuan had sold him were useful, but inefficient. Whether they were outdated or deliberately incomplete, Fang Ming could not rely on purchasing or slowly refining dream Gu by hand.
He needed a production system.
Thus, Fang Ming created a new plan.
A massive dream formation.
Dream Feather Immortal Gu would be one core.
Unfathomable Will Immortal Gu would be the second core.
This formation would allow three hundred Gu Masters to enter controlled dreams at the same time.
These were not expert dreams.
They were not inheritance dreams.
They were not ancient memories that could raise attainment.
They were the Gu Masters' own dreams.
Their obsessions.
Their life experiences.
Their fears.
Their ambitions.
Their regrets.
There was no attainment to gain from these dreams. A person dreaming of childhood could not grant Fang Ming formation path attainment. A rank four Gu Master dreaming of a battle could not provide true battle path comprehension.
But such dreams could produce dream path materials.
They could also occasionally produce mortal dream path Gu.
Normally, allowing mortals and low-rank Gu Masters to explore dreams would be dangerous. Even their own dreams could trap them if emotions became too intense. Some might suffer soul damage. Some might lose themselves in obsession.
But with Dream Feather and Unfathomable Will as formation cores, the danger could be controlled.
Dream Feather protected entry and retreat.
Unfathomable Will stabilized the mind and suppressed emotional collapse.
Most of these Gu Masters were mortals. The dangers in their own dreams were also mortal-level. To two rank six Immortal Gu, this level of danger was manageable.
Fang Ming built the dream formation inside a restricted zone of his strength aperture.
Three hundred stone sleeping chambers formed a circle around a central altar. Dream Feather hovered above the altar like a pale feather-shaped moon. Unfathomable Will sank below it, releasing a quiet stabilizing pressure.
When the formation activated, three hundred Gu Masters slept.
Their dreams rose like bubbles.
Some bubbles produced nothing.
Some produced weak rank one or rank two dream material.
Some produced rank three material.
Only a minority of rank four and rank five Gu Masters produced truly useful resources.
All dream path Gu were collected by Fang Ming.
All dream path materials were stored separately, then sent to the dream factory.
The dream factory contained the best refinement Gu Masters in Fang Ming's aperture. Their task was to process raw dream path materials into usable consumable dream path mortal Gu for Fang Ming's own dream exploration.
Unfortunately, the result still disappointed him.
The dream factory could not keep up.
His exploration consumed dream path mortal Gu faster than the formation could produce materials.
Building a second dream factory was pointless. The bottleneck was not refinement manpower. The bottleneck was raw dream path materials.
To solve this, Fang Ming needed more dream formations.
He planned to copy the two Immortal Gu cores in the future and create a second formation.
But even that would not be enough.
He estimated he needed four full dream formations worth of dream path materials to properly sustain his exploration.
Then came another problem.
He did not have enough useful dreamers.
The Eagle Sect could barely support two formations.
Not every Gu Master dreamed often.
Not every dream had value.
A rank one Gu Master might produce rank one dream material, but such material was almost useless to Fang Ming. Rank two was not much better. Rank three could barely be used. The only reason Fang Ming allowed some rank three Gu Masters into the dream formation was because he lacked enough rank four and rank five Gu Masters.
Better than nothing.
As a result, his warehouse became filled with rank three dream path materials that were not urgently useful.
Rank four and rank five dream path materials remained insufficient.
Buying relic Gu to raise rank three Gu Masters into rank four had to be placed on the agenda.
The four fairies were also ordered to gather more mortals and Gu Masters through their channels. But this was a long-term investment. Newly gathered mortals would not become useful dreamers immediately. They had to be settled, fed, trained, and cultivated.
Most would first be allocated to farming, construction, village expansion, and junglefowl formation support.
Their immediate value was low.
But Fang Ming did not regret it.
A foundation was built with time.
For now, because Dream Feather had to remain inside the dream formation to produce materials, Fang Ming temporarily stopped deep dream exploration.
Without enough consumable dream path mortal Gu, forcing more exploration would only waste resources.
Thus, he turned his attention to gains he could use immediately.
First, he adjusted the junglefowl food beast formations.
The changes were not large. He modified several flow nodes, changed beast-feeding intervals, improved waste recycling, and adjusted the Gu worms responsible for stabilizing the formation's resource cycle.
The result was immediate.
Each formation's monthly pure profit rose from ninety immortal essence stones to one hundred.
Then he rebuilt the eagle formation.
The original formation was dismantled in stages to avoid disturbing the eagle groups too much. The new version was smaller, denser, and far more efficient. The core training regions became more layered. Young eagles, mutated eagles, enhanced eagles, and combat eagles were separated more cleanly.
The formation's occupied land fell to one-third.
Growth speed rose.
Training quality rose.
The number of higher-level eagles increased.
The Eagle Sect disciples were shocked.
They had thought the old eagle formation was already a miracle. Only after seeing the new one did they realize that the old formation had been merely functional, not refined.
After that, Fang Ming began transforming the factories.
Factory formations were more complicated than beast formations. They could not simply pursue power. They had to match human workers, refinement steps, safety controls, and material movement.
Fang Ming did not complete all transformations at once.
But even the first completed factory showed the future direction.
Production rose from two to four totems per month.
Material waste fell.
Worker injuries decreased.
Fewer Gu Masters were needed per production chain.
The freed manpower could be moved to dream formations, farming, construction, beast care, or military training.
This pleased Fang Ming greatly.
A Gu Immortal's strength was not only battle power.
It was production.
It was logistics.
It was manpower.
It was the ability to turn resources into more resources.
Only after dealing with these matters did Fang Ming remember his second aperture.
His enslavement path aperture.
It had been left quiet for too long.
When Fang Ming entered it, the world inside was still mostly empty. The land was wide, the sky was pale, and the environment lacked a mature ecosystem.
Then he found the three hounds.
The three desolate star hounds had been left there and nearly forgotten.
By the time Fang Ming found them, they were starving. Their bodies were thinner than before, their fur dull, and their eyes filled with aggression. They had fought each other several times due to hunger, leaving wounds across their bodies.
Fang Ming frowned.
This was his negligence.
Desolate beasts were valuable. Leaving them to starve was wasteful.
Subduing them took time.
The three star hounds were not eagles, and Control Eagle Immortal Gu was not perfectly suited to them. Fang Ming had to use it as an enslavement path command core, then support it with several mortal killer moves. He weakened them, fed them, pressured them, and gradually broke their resistance.
It took a long time before the three desolate star hounds finally lowered their heads.
After enslaving them, Fang Ming began building an ecosystem around them.
Forests were introduced first.
Then rabbits.
Birds.
Wolves.
Foxes.
Ordinary hound groups.
Mutated hound groups.
Some eagles from the strength aperture were also transferred over, not as the main force, but to create aerial balance and scouting pressure.
The focus remained on hounds.
Fang Ming wanted to build a combat system around the three desolate star hounds. They would become the apex of the hound groups, leading packs in battle and forming the early military foundation of his enslavement path aperture.
He did not plan to introduce humans yet.
His strength path aperture still needed mortals and Gu Masters badly. The villages had expanded, factories needed workers, dream formations needed dreamers, food beast formations needed guards, and the Eagle Sect needed disciples.
Splitting the human population now would slow everything down.
The enslavement aperture could wait.
For now, beasts were enough.
Fang Ming stood above a newly formed forest and looked down.
Below him, three desolate star hounds raised their heads and howled. Around them, ordinary hound groups answered one after another. Wolves moved through the trees. Eagles circled in the sky. Foxes hid in the grass. Rabbits scattered into burrows.
This world was still crude.
But it had begun to breathe.
One month outside had passed.
Inside his aperture, more than three years had transformed purchased knowledge into foundation.
Refinement path grandmaster gave him production.
Formation path grandmaster gave him structure.
Dream Feather opened a new road.
And now, even his forgotten second aperture had finally begun to take shape.