In the depths of the Eastern Sea, another scene passed within the Dragon Palace dream realm.
The dragonman clone focused intently, commanding the ant swarm as the army advanced.
The dark mass of ants, several thousand strong, held tight formation. Armored ants led the way at the vanguard, followed by arrow ants, while king ants occupied the center. At the very rear of the army were the cannon ants, bulky and slow-moving.
Before the dragonman clone, Tai Qin similarly commanded her own ant army.
"Senior Brother, here I come!" the yellow-browed girl cried out, launching her army into a charge straight toward Fang Yuan's forces.
Fang Yuan quickly adjusted his mental commands, steadying his formation, using armored ants to hold the line while cannon ants bombarded from behind.
The ant army under Tai Qin's control consisted mostly of spear ants and charge ants, making it extremely aggressive.
Fang Yuan chuckled to himself: "Ever since the Green Ant Scholar's Disciple Acceptance Ceremony, where I defeated Tai Qin, she seems to have been stung by the loss. She's completely abandoned her previous cautious and steady fighting style, becoming aggressive and devoted to all-out offense."
At this moment, two squadrons of charge ants swept around from the left and right flanks.
Tai Qin's tactic was obvious—she intended to use the charge ants' speed to quickly strike Fang Yuan's rear cannon ants.
The cannon ants were devastating at long range, with extreme firing distance. A single blast inflicted terrible casualties on the spear ants directly ahead. However, they were slow-moving and poorly defended. If those two charge ants closed in, they would be torn to shreds.
"A sound tactic, indeed. However, the reason I arranged my formation this way is precisely because I accounted for this weakness. Junior Sister." Fang Yuan smiled at the girl before him.
"Then bring it on, Senior Brother!" the yellow-browed girl shouted, her eyes blazing with golden light—she was going all out.
The charge ants' assault force swept around, and Fang Yuan's entire ant army continuously retreated, wrapping the rear cannon ants in dense layers of protection. The whole process unfolded with fluid grace.
Seeing this, Tai Qin's eyes went wide, and she exclaimed with an adorable look on her face: "Incredible! Senior Brother, you can actually control all the ants at once!! Have you already mastered the 'Ant Thought' killer move that Master taught us?"
Fang Yuan nodded with a smile.
Tai Qin gritted her teeth: "Even so, I absolutely won't give up easily! Your vanguard—I'm taking it!"
It turned out that to facilitate the army's retreat, Fang Yuan had left all the armored ants at the front line to hold off Tai Qin's spear ants.
Fang Yuan's ant swarm successfully retreated, but became disconnected from the armored ant corps at the front.
The armored ants couldn't hold for long before being overwhelmed by the far more numerous spear ants.
Spear ants surged forward like a tidal wave.
Fang Yuan had long since prepared his arrow ants, deployed at the outermost perimeter, continuously firing ant arrows. Overhead, cannon shots soared through the air before crashing into the spear ant formation, obliterating entire clusters.
Under Fang Yuan's relentless barrage of arrows and bombardment, Tai Qin couldn't hold on, and her ant army was swiftly annihilated.
"Phew! I lost again, Senior Brother. You're still better!!" The yellow-browed girl let out a turbid breath, her eyes shimmering with a gentle light as she gazed at Fang Yuan, a faint blush on each cheek.
Fang Yuan took it all in, understanding clearly.
Since the Green Ant Scholar's Disciple Acceptance Ceremony, three scenes had passed in the dream realm.
Looking back, Fang Yuan still felt a lingering sense of unease.
In the dream scene of the Disciple Acceptance Ceremony, no matter how great his advantage, there would always be various unexpected occurrences that wiped it clean.
But Fang Yuan had not surrendered. Instead, after careful consideration, he chose to conceal his true strength and fight a prolonged battle, clashing stubbornly with the yellow-browed girl.
In the end, they fought to a draw, both reaching the limits of Gu Masters, before the Green Ant Scholar appeared and called a halt, taking both of them as his disciples.
It turned out that the Green Ant Scholar's criteria for selecting disciples, on the surface an ant control duel, actually carried a deeper purpose—testing the Gu Master's character and just how far their perseverance could go.
If Fang Yuan had surrendered voluntarily, he would have failed to meet this criterion, and the dream exploration would have ended in failure.
Therefore, to pass the Disciple Acceptance Ceremony, the key was neither victory nor defeat, but a draw.
After overcoming that hurdle, the subsequent dream scenes all involved the Green Ant Scholar passing down his teachings and Dao. Fang Yuan's Gu insects increased greatly in number, and his main rival became his Junior Sister, Tai Qin.
That yellow-browed girl had never won a single match against Fang Yuan since they began sparring.
At first, she had refused to accept it, but gradually she had been beaten into submission—and perhaps even developed a faint hint of affection, though even she herself might not have been aware of it.
"Excellent. It seems my clone is making great progress in the dream realm." Fang Yuan's main body observed the dragonman clone's fortune.
He could see that the purple dragon's fortune had swollen several times over, while the surrounding black clouds had diminished by thirty percent.
At the same time, the blue-purple energy transmuted from the black qi was becoming increasingly dense, noticeably more so than before.
But just then, a mass of crimson light suddenly drifted in from the west.