Fang Yuan simply awaited the arrival of Paradise Earth's Will. The Will stopped before him, glancing down below at the waters filled with the corpses of the people Fang Yuan had just slaughtered. Looking at the scene, the Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable's Will shook its head.
"Fang Yuan, have you learned nothing from your experiences up until now? I would have thought that those experiences would've changed you. The world is ending, and yet you still resort to such bloodshed for the tiniest bit of gain. Shouldn't you be focused on other priorities rather than pointless savagery?"
"If the world is ending, then what does it matter?" Fang Yuan replied indifferently. "The people I slaughter here are but a drop in the vast ocean of life I'm meant to save. Even in my past life, their presence didn't amount to anything in the long run, which means their absence will not change anything either."
Paradise Earth's Will shook its head and waved its hand. A formation began activating - a formation hidden within the Integration Formation itself. Fang Yuan watched as the tiny pieces of the corpses he had thrown into the sea vanished. His investigative methods, placed outside of his aperture, alerted him to a change.
"You brought them all back to life..."
Fang Yuan sighed. That was the way of Paradise Earth Immortal Venerable. He would often make it so a demonic cultivator could neither attack nor retreat, stuck in place until they changed their ways. Fang Yuan would never change his ways, but he also wouldn't get stuck like them.
"They are back, but that is not the end of things," Paradise Earth's Will stated. "However, they are still scarred mentally from what you did to them. For your own benefit, and for theirs, it is best if you have them forget."
Fang Yuan let out a cold snort. The entire point of killing them was to experiment with Emotion Path methods and to refine them, which he had already succeeded in. The Human Qi generated from their deaths was just a side benefit, and the process had only shown him how difficult such a project would be. Killing a handful of humans or a few villages wouldn't be enough. He might end up having to kill even more people than he did back when he refined the Spring Autumn Cicada.
"If you want to create the Human Sea," Paradise Earth's will seemed to understand Fang Yuan's thoughts immediately. "It is a secluded domain of Heaven and Earth. Fang Yuan, you have already deduced a part of its construction, but it does not require the death of humans or living sacrifices. It merely requires a large concentration of Human Qi within an area. With time, you will be able to create it without bloodshed."
The Human Sea was meant to be generated using massive amounts of Human Qi. Fang Yuan already knew that, but a lack of Qi Path methods meant that he could only try in this kind of roundabout manner. Fang Yuan had attempted to use multiple human corpses to generate it, but if he had Qi Path methods, he could potentially create a formation that gathered the Human Qi within his own sovereign immortal aperture to form the sea without harming a single soul. The Qi Path was an ancient path much like the Strength Path and Fang Yuan had no foundation in it. On top of which, without a proper Formation Path foundation he would also be unable to make that kind of formation.
The bigger issue was that Fang Yuan did not ordinarily care for such methods given how time-consuming they were, and it was faster to just find a large number of people and then kill them.
Right now though, he had no such large source of human bodies. He could not harm those within his aperture.
Of course, the Embodiment of Humanity's Collective Will had also developed a massive amount of Human Qi over millions of years. However, much of it had been expended during his tribulation in order to create this aperture or was being used to refine the Rank 9 gu worm in his orbit. Almost none of it was left to try and create either the Human Sea or Human Mountain.
At these words, Genesis Lotus Immortal Venerable's Will appeared. "Fang Yuan, the Heavenly Court has many Qi Path inheritances left behind by the strongest Qi Path Cultivator - Primordial Origin Immortal Venerable himself. If you were to join, you might finally be able to find a way to construct this Human Sea like you're intending too."
Fang Yuan coldly snorted as he left his aperture and went over to the villagers. Those from the Bei, Xiu, He, and Ye clans were quite confused as to what happened.
"Did I die?"
"Is this heaven?"
"Impossible, if this was heaven the women would be prettier. Must be the other place then - ow!"
"But was I dreaming?"
"Were we all dreaming?"
Fang Yuan watched them from above.
He used Emotion and Wisdom Path methods to scrub their memories of recent events.
While he didn't care about the trauma he had inflicted, allowing them to remember the specific methods he used would make it easier for his enemies to counter them in the future. There was still the tiny possibility of them being soul-searched, but that was so insignificant as to not even be worth consideration.
He could have simply killed them all again, but he had a sinking feeling Paradise Earth would just revive them, and he had better things to do with his time than go on a back-and-forth with that person.
A better idea was to move them all into his aperture but he could not do so right now.
He did the same with several of his Gu Yue clansmen.
Once he was done, the people below remembered very little - only that a feast had broken out, they had drunk too much, and they had suddenly woken up not remembering what had happened.
All in all though, Fang Yuan was still satisfied with the outcome.
Glancing down at the villagers and the shining surface of Bei Gu Mountain, he returned to his aperture. It was time to test his latest experiments.
Using the data he had collected during the massacre, he already had several new ideas for many more killer moves than what he'd intended. This was because of his strong attainment in the Emotion Path. However, he would put those ideas on hold for now.
Right now, he just wanted to see if Familial Emotion worked the way he had wanted it to.
He had used up 700 of the Depression Millipedes he had ordered, leaving about 9,300 left. He was running out of them faster than he'd anticipated, but that was because he had been testing things until now and had wasted several of them.
The finalized move should have consumed far less of them than those tests.
Fang Yuan floated into the White Heaven above his aperture and began arranging several gu worms before he nodded off to sleep.