He discovered that the small island transported to by the Merit Stele was thoroughly ordinary and unremarkable. The island held few resources — a small fishing village had been established there, with some people living out their lives.
Where there was a fishing village, there would naturally be a Origin Spring. There were Gu Masters among the inhabitants, of course, but given the barren environment and sparse population, having a Fourth Transformation Gu Master at most was the absolute ceiling.
The task Fang Yuan had accepted this time was to collect black oil from the undersea trench. Sure enough, his probing quickly revealed faint traces of black oil seeping out at the island's edge.
Any other Gu Immortal might have immediately dove into the sea to start gathering the trench black oil. But Fang Yuan had no intention of doing so. The moment he laid eyes on the Merit Stele, he had already begun to deliberate over the intentions of Immortal Venerable Le Tu.
He concealed himself and slipped into the fishing village. The small settlement did not have many residents, and only five or six Gu Masters lived there. The strongest among them was a mere Third Transformation Gu Master — a far cry from the Guye Stockade on Qing Mao Mountain. Back in the day, the Guye Stockade alone had nearly ten vassal villages like this one under its control.
Fang Yuan went straight to the village's only Third Transformation Gu Master.
It was an old man, his hair white as snow, his face a mass of deep wrinkles. From the way others addressed him, his identity as village chief was readily apparent.
Fang Yuan was quite satisfied.
High status, considerable authority, and advanced age — the old man was bound to know a great deal.
Soul Search!
Fang Yuan deployed his immortal methods, and the old village chief's secrets were laid bare in an instant.
In the blink of an eye, Fang Yuan had obtained a massive volume of intelligence, extremely detailed. Just as he had expected, this small village was perfectly ordinary. And there were quite a few similar small villages and tiny islands scattered throughout the surrounding area.
"This little fishing village seems to have no hidden tricks or peculiarities," Fang Yuan realized, then quietly departed the settlement.
The old village chief merely felt a brief moment of daze, gave a slight frown of puzzlement, and went right back to what he had been doing.
Fang Yuan's soul-searching technique was so far beyond what any mortal Gu Master could comprehend that it was laughable.
Fang Yuan left the small island covertly and flew toward the nearby islands.
But what had happened before at the Merit Stele — the scene with the island — played out all over again on Fang Yuan's body.
Even though he could already see the tip of a small island poking above the horizon, no matter how he flew, the distance between them simply would not shrink.
He tried every method at his disposal, yet Fang Yuan remained utterly unsuccessful.
"Immortal Venerable Le Tu cultivated Sound Path in his early years, and later devoted himself exclusively to Earth Path. This kind of 'so close yet worlds apart' technique was one of his signature tricks."
In the history of the human race, there had been numerous battle records in which Immortal Venerable Le Tu simply stood in place and let his enemies attack. But their fists, their killer moves — none could reach him, no matter how short the distance appeared to be.
"Beyond that, Immortal Venerable Le Tu possessed one more technique that people found most enviable: the ability to create paradises."
Paradises…
This was also the primary origin of Immortal Venerable Le Tu's title. No one knew how to create a paradise, yet Immortal Venerable Le Tu had left behind a vast number of them for the Five Regions and Two Heavens.
A paradise had one defining characteristic — no disasters and no tribulations.
"This Dragon Whale Cave Heaven must also have been transformed by Immortal Venerable Le Tu, turned into a paradise."
The intelligence Fang Yuan had scraped from the old village chief's soul largely corroborated this. Had there been any disasters or tribulations, even if the old chief himself had not personally felt them, the village's official records and chronicles should have contained some mention of them. Yet no such information existed anywhere.
Since he could not reach the other small islands, Fang Yuan changed direction and plunged into the water.
As he descended deeper, the ocean's pressure grew ever more immense.
This water pressure was a challenge that every oil-collecting Gu Master had to contend with. But for an Eighth Transformation Gu Immortal like Fang Yuan, it was utterly negligible.
For an ordinary Gu Master, the sea might seem fathomlessly deep. But from a Gu Immortal's perspective, the waters surrounding an island were practically shallow.
Fang Yuan quickly spotted a vast expanse of dark, murky haze filling his field of vision. It resembled an enormous strip of kelp, stretching continuously from east to west.
The undersea trench was truly magnificent. The unremarkable small island sat almost right at its edge. And according to the intelligence he had obtained from the old village chief, undersea trenches extended near all of the surrounding islands as well.
The trenches were rich in black oil.
Whether they were ordinary trenches or undersea ones.