"These aren't the ones who betrayed me," Fang Yuan said without a lick of remorse once he was done soul-searching them. His methods had torn apart their souls molecule by molecule. As for their physical forms it was not much better. They did not even leave behind proper corpses - their bodies had erupted into droplets of blood lining the floor like two shallow puddles of unsightly sludge. They had died miserably; even street dogs had more dignified deaths compared to how these two had perished. But this was common practice in the Blood Wing Demon Sect. Anyone who opposed their Supreme Elder was made an example of, and traitors naturally faced the most brutal executions. "Keep searching! The traitors are still out there! Whoever they are, they would have certainly left clues... I will let no one leave my Immortal Aperture until they are found!"
His Immortal Aperture housed the elite of the Blood Wing Demon Sect. His Imperial Palace spanned over 1,000 acres in terms of area. It held not only his own Blood Path resources, but other things of value - like virginal female Gu Masters whom they had taken prisoner in order to help some of their more promising young recruits but who had bad talent advance to Rank 3.
In turn, these sect members helped in the management of his aperture. They handled whatever tasks Fang Yuan need to have fulfilled, whether this was in the refinement of certain Blood Path gu worms, feeding the blood beasts, or running experiments on prisoners they had captured to refine Blood Path methods to name a few of the tasks Fang Yuan delegated to them.
As for why they had joined him - many of them had their reasons, but most of it chalked up to the chaotic atmosphere at the time. The Five Region's War had left many without families and without a means to provide for themselves and so they flocked to his banner for protection. Some of them were true demons however, simply wanting a leader who could show them more extreme forms of cruelty and malice.
Fang Yuan had considered that it was easier to do this rather than using slaves. Slaves had to be restrained, were expensive, and were hard to motivate. Recalcitrant slaves might even choose to sabotage his means of production simply to spite him.
These people, however, were highly motivated to finish whatever tasks he assigned to them.
With hindsight Fang Yuan knew that he lost more than he gained in nurturing them, but at the time, he had considered it to be a fair enough arrangement.
However, this arrangement had led to spies sneaking in. Fang Yuan clearly needed to alter the sect's recruiting policies to ensure that members were properly vetted.
"As Supreme Elder commands!" his subordinates yelled out, quaking under his intense gaze. These demon lords and demon generals who could cause the mortal world to tremble; they were nothing but ants beneath Fang Yuan's gaze.
Anger consumed him again. However, this slowly dissipated as the dream realm shifted and he was back to his prior emotional state.
Outside, in Gu Yue village, a Gu Master was so angry he punched a hole in the wall. 'Ah, if only I had a wife or children, I could punch them to get rid of some of my anger... but I only have this wall to take my anger on right now... now I'll have to pay for repairing it...' the man thought.
Just like this, Fang Yuan continued to explore his own dream realms. He experienced a wide spectrum of emotions ranging from anger to greed to love.
He went through them with ease, his emotional state never wavering for longer than a few breaths of time before his killer move continued to take effect. The Gu Yue villagers continued to take the brunt of his emotional burden as this went on.
Fang Yuan eventually opened his eyes, satisfied with the results.
He had obtained a large number of mortal Dream Path gu worms.
He checked his soul foundation; it had barely been phased by the exploration. The experiment was a success! There were two major obstacles to entering a dream realm. The first was damage to one's soul. The other was the issue of having one's emotions go out of control, or become overwhelming.
This killer move of his, Familial Emotion, was an attempt to find a solution to the second problem. Much like in The Legends of Ren Zu, it could be used to dissipate his emotional burden to his relatives. Because of this he had been able to explore far more dream realms than he would've otherwise been able to.
By using his blood relatives as "disposable trash cans" for his excessive emotions, he could explore dream realms for far longer than any other Gu Master. He had accomplished in a day what could've taken weeks and with very little damage to his soul to boot.
'This is good,' Fang Yuan thought, 'but not perfect.'
The biggest flaw was the consumption of Depression Millipedes. He had already seven hundred of them while developing this move. He had just used up 300 more. That meant that he had already lost a thousand out of ten thousand Depression Millipedes that he had bought.
He might not even find another buyer on Yellow Treasure Heaven for weeks and it had cost a large amount of Immortal Essence stones to purchase. This was a huge limiting factor for his use of this move.
He needed a more permanent and sustainable solution.
Even if Fang Yuan perfected Familial Emotion, however, there were still several obstacles when it came to the exploration of dream realms that he had to overcome.
Regarding his soul foundation, he would need Dang Hun Mountain in order to build it up. The Goody Two-Shoes System had given him all the Guts Gu it had accumulated already. Beyond this, he would need something like Luo Po Valley in order to further increase his foundation.
He already had Dreams of Love and Happiness Gu which was a failsafe for exploring dangerous dream realms. But this had numerous drawbacks.
Next, he needed a way to solve dream realms easily without sacrificing the attainment he could obtain from them. For that, he needed to be able to use Unravel Dream.
This was why he was refining so many mortal dream gu worms in the first place. He wanted to see if he could substitute Unravel Mystery Gu with Dreams of Love and Happiness Gu in order to perfect this killer move.
Theoretically it should have been easy. Unravel Dream was just the usage of Wisdom Path methods in order to replicate the effect of a Dream Path effect. He had a Dream Path Rank 6 gu worm - Dreams of Love and Happiness Gu as well as somewhat reasonable attainment of Master in Wisdom Path as well as Great Grandmaster in a neighboring path, Emotion Path.
With all of these tools at his disposal, modifying Unravel Dream should simply involve changing some of the components until it worked. Fang Yuan had the recipe for Unravel Dream from the future.
And yet, as Fang Yuan continued to experiment, he could only frown as he was met with repeated failure.
He continued to experiment long into the night, to the point where his mortal gu worms had already been entirely used up and he was left with nothing but to go back to square one.
'It is not a big deal, with the Gu Yue clansmen's help, I can move forward with this at a later time,' Fang Yuan thought.
That was why he didn't want to kill the Gu Yue clansmen right now. If anything, he wanted a way to raise their birthrate so that he would have more sacks of meat in order to offload his emotional burden to.
Naturally this would be easier if they were inside his aperture where time flowed faster, but he could not put them there. Yet.
'Regardless, I need to find a way to solve these problems. One of the greatest boons of being a regressor is that I have advanced knowledge of the Dream Path, I cannot let this opportunity pass me by,' Fang Yuan thought.
Even if he solved this problem though, there was still one last one he had to deal with. That was access to the dream realms themselves. Since everyone knew the prophecy of the Great Dream Immortal Venerable, dream realms were naturally prized. As they would continued to manifest, people would want to seize them for themselves.
Because of this, Fang Yuan would be limited in his ability to find as many as he wanted. He would either need to join a Super Force, or find a way to steal them. The Righteous Path had greatly outpaced the Demonic Path when it came to dream realm exploration because of this method.
There was an alternative however - Dream Wings Immortal Gu. With it Fang Yuan could easily explore dream realms regardless of where he was in the world and would not need to be physically near them. He had invaded the Hu Immortal Blessed Land in his previous life and killed Feng Jin Huang for the same.
He could not do so now even if he wanted to and even if she wasn't protected by her father. Feng Jin Huang was an essential component of his future design.
Now that he thought about that moment, however, he realized just how... odd it was. He had invade the Hu Immortal Blessed Land with several other demonic cultivators. Yet, from what he understood from the Embodiment of Humanity's Collective Will's grand design, Feng Jin Huang should not have died in any timeline.
'Is this related to me finding the Spring Autumn Cicada shortly thereafter? And why Heaven's Will has continued to tolerate my existence and that of this anomalous Immortal Aperture?' Fang Yuan wondered. The pieces of information he had gathered were like bread crumbs. He did not have enough to paint a full picture. Who were those other demonic cultivators? He had earlier thought that they were random people who had gathered for a certain goal, but now he had reason to believe that they had all been coordinating together.
Whoever they were, they had to have been quite powerful to have so many Immortal subordinates among them.
And yet, despite the evidence that they had been working together, they had not struck against Fang Yuan while in the Hu Immortal Blessed land. If anything they had been strangely supportive of Fang Yuan as he moved forward to fight Feng Jin Huang.
"Ah, Lord Fang Yuan, go on ahead and fight Fairy Feng Jin Huang. We will deal with these other pests and traps she has set up!"
"Indeed, don't worry about moving forward, I have methods to limit the suppression of Dang Hun Mountain!"
'How generous,' Fang Yuan had thought at the time. He had not met these people before, and yet here they were, coordinating with him and each other perfectly. They were all working in such harmony that all of them could almost have been mistaken for Righteous Path Gu Immortals.
For whatever reason, despite showing monstrous strength, they did not seem to want to fight Feng Jin Huang directly and allowed Fang Yuan to strike her while they supported Fang Yuan indirectly. This was all fine for Fang Yuan, after all, to the victor go the spoils!
He had not gotten Dream Wings Immortal Gu in the end - Feng Jin Huang had detonated it before dying along with sending Dang Hun Mountain to someone in the Spirit Affinity House. Fang Yuan had felt a deep sense of loss after that fight, but his 'companions' had still been overjoyed as if this mission had been a massive success.
'It was as if... Dang Hun Mountain and the Dream Wings Immortal Gu were not their true targets, but rather, killing Feng Jin Huang had been their actual main objective. But then why leave the actual fighting to me?' Fang Yuan mused. He was strong, but if he had to face the rest of them all at once he'd have no choice other than to retreat.
Fang Yuan never saw any of them again after that mission, quickly stumbling upon the recipe for Spring Autumn Cicada. The rest was history.