As it was, Fang Yuan did not have any injuries on his body that Doctor Gu could say anything about it, so he simply called the House Spirit for some food.
The way that Human Path gu worms ate could be very odd indeed. Although they looked human, they were not bound by the same rules of physiology as people. Doctor Gu needed a lot of cooked rice to function, and the way he ate it was by unhinging his jaw and opening his mouth impossibly wide - like how some snakes ate, before stuffing it down his gullet in one go.
"Thanks for that."
"No problem," the House Spirit said. Feeding the gu worms in the Dollhouse had been something that Fang Yuan had been worried about, but most of them fed on human qi or had easy feeding requirements. The house had many food path gu worms and had its own stored food supply as well as puppets like Chef Gu that could assist with the house's feeding.
Once Doctor Gu was done eating he simply went back into Fang Yuan's aperture.
Six hours later, Fang Yuan awoke still feeling very tired but he needed to show his face to the clan by this point. Otherwise, strange rumors would begin to circulate about him dying or something or the other.
He looked outside. It was actually in the middle of the night as he emerged from the clan's underground storage. The guard who was stationed in front of the Clan Head's Pavilion was awake - no one would dare sleep if they were guarding this place - and saluted to him as he walked in.
Fang Yuan woke Fang Zheng up. "Oh, who is it? Brother, you..."
"Yes, I'm done with my closed-door cultivation," Fang Yuan said. It was only then that Fang Zheng noted his Rank 5 aura.
"Oh wow, Brother! So you succeeded! That's fantastic!"
"Yes, I did," Fang Yuan said. "I'm going to sleep now, and don't wake me up unless it's something important. Feel free to tell everyone in the morning that I've reached Rank 5, however."
"As you say," Fang Zheng said. Fang Yuan went to sleep and awoke in the afternoon the next day, feeling fresh but extremely hungry. He asked for some food.
"Good news, Brother!" Fang Zheng said, walking into his room. "The Xiong Clan have finally decided to submit to us!"
Fang Yuan did not say anything, but he had been expecting this.
The moment word got out that he had reached Rank 5, the other clans must have known that their time was soon up.
The only thing was that the Bai Clan felt that they could hang on longer to their independence because they had a new external elder with them who had managed to gain the approval of their old ancestor. While they could see the writing on the wall, they probably wanted to wait things out so that they would have greater leverage down the road.
Fang Yuan could pressure Bai Ning Bing to bring them under the Gu Yue Village's wing right now. However, there was no need to do so currently.
The next few days were quite busy as the logistics of how the Xiong clan would be assimilated into the Gu Yue clan needed to be worked out. They had their own elders who would be accepted as external elders.
The Gu Yue Clan had many elders, but even if they outnumbered the Xiong clan, the Xiong clan still had three of them. That was more than enough to make its own tiny faction within Gu Yue Village's political system, which naturally the other elders did not want.
For that matter, the other elders were somewhat disappointed to hear that Fang Yuan had reached Rank 5 - not those in his camp, of course, like Qing Shu and Han Lin, but the others who had bemoaned their lack of authority.
Given how much Fang Yuan wielded near-absolute power, with time as the village improved, although it was a good thing, it also carried the downside of decreasing his influence. The more stable the village was, the less he could unilaterally make massive decisions like trying to assimilate the Xiong and Bai clans.
However, that changed now that he had become Rank 5. It was a qualitative change that put him head and shoulders above all of the other elders. Just at Rank 4 peak stage, there was nothing that they could really do to him, even if they tried to gang up against him.
At Rank 5, it was completely out of the question. Normally, there would have been a large feast and ceremony celebrating Fang Yuan as the third Rank 5 Clan Head within the clan's history. Many people had bemoaned the fact that the clan's bloodline was thinning away with time, and that the fourth gen Clan Head had died without leaving any offspring resulting in such a scenario. If he wanted, he could order a massive military parade or the like in his honor.
However, he had ordered that such things be kept short.
It had been one thing regarding the funeral- that would have been for the sake of the other villagers.
However, he had no desire to massage his own ego with a grand festival. As it was, this was only the beginning.
'And now that I am at Rank 5, it is only the beginning,' Fang Yuan thought to himself. 'I still need to refine the Righteous Virtue Physique, or find a way to possibly obtain the Ancient Moon Desolate Yin Physique, before I ascend to immortality. As long as my foundation is good, the rewards of becoming immortal will be even greater.'
The Spring Autumn Cicada, his vital Gu, was still quite weak. What he had done last time, by forcing it to travel back a few weeks, had depleted any signs of recovery that it had made up until that point. Its leaves were back to their withered grayish state and its body had lost the luster it used to have.
With his new Rank 5 aperture, he could contain its Rank 6 power for longer. He estimated that it would be about five years before it reached the point where he would be forced to advance because of its recovery. That was assuming that he didn't enter some place like a blessed land, of course.
Although he was kept so busy in the next few days that he could not resume cultivating, that did not mean that there were not other ways that he could improve his battle strength.
The reward for advancing to Rank 5 had been a dream realm, but he still thought that he had not fully recovered from his breakthrough to Rank 5 to do that. Without proper rest his soul would be even more vulnerable to damage if he happened to fail so he was putting it off for now.
So, he instead focused his attention on mastering the Puppet Path. The creator of the Dollhouse mentioned in his own records not by name but as 'The Immortal Puppet Master' had been a Human Path Gu Master when they had been a mortal. Once they had advanced, they had begun forming an entire, the Puppet Path, a very niche path which combined the Human Path and Enslavement Path.