Gu Yan easily killed all of the demon beasts guarding the two Deity Lakes and obtained the demon beast blood he wanted.
What surprised him was the amount of Spiritual Stones already in the lakes.
There were tens of millions in each of the two!
Gu Yan quickly understood why there were so much Spiritual Stones inside of the two Deity Lakes.
{Well, that's means nobody strong enough managed to discover them, and they accumulated those stones over tens or even hundreds of years}
With Gu Long still leading the way, he went looking for his next target.
Gu Yan learned from Gu Long that in addition to Eighth Clan Elder Gu Bai and Ninth Clan Elder Gu Feng, there were eight more elders who were on Gu Heng's side.
They also had a middle-grade Deity Lake each, with eight hundred Heavenly Star and two hundred Heavenly Axis underlings, it seems like it was the common setup for any elder.
Their underlings also got tricked by Gu Yan and he soon had another ten thousand underlings.
Nearly one hundred of them became Dao of Dragon Cultivators.
After giving them their new cultivation techniques, he took half of the new Dao of Dragon experts to guard his two high-grade Deity Lakes.
Gu Long and all of the rest were told to act as if nothing happened.
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Back to the institute, Gu Yan didn't bother trying to trick the eleven elders whom he just took the underlings from and directly went into their houses to knock them unconscious before they could even detect his presence.
With his current cultivation, he could easily hide his actions from the sect master who was a Stage-5 Martial Ancestor.
His cultivation technique was much more powerful after all.
He started by Gu Yu, putting inscriptions on his body to let him have a slow and painful death.
Now, he wouldn't be able to use his Heavenly Energy and would feel a soul-tearing pain.
If he could endure it for three years, then one of the inscriptions would activate to kill him.
As for the other elders, he just put some soul seals on them.
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Gu Yan told all of his underlings that Gu Long would be his right-hand man and to listen to him.
He proposed them the same deals he had with Xiao Yan.
Every three days, Gu Long would come with hundreds of thousand Spiritual Stones from the other underlings to buy Heavenly Note Dews, Spiritual Stone Essences or Gold Spiritual Stone Essences.
Gu Yan only took ten percent of profits, as he wanted them to become stronger.
The ten Elders were Stage-9 Dao of Dragon experts, but nowhere near to become Martial Ancestors.
Even with their new cultivation techniques and the Gold Spiritual Stone Essences they bought from Gu Yan, they would still need many months or years to make a breakthrough!
The Gu Clan issued a mission for curing the Third Elder Gu Yu, rewarding a hundred thousand Spiritual Stones, but neither he nor his clones cared.
The Elders thought that it was because Gu Heng offended them when they came to the institute, so the latter was taking all the blame.
They knew that they were going to lose a Stage-9 Dao of Dragon but they could only grit their teeth and accept their loss.
After all, they didn't want to offend Hierarch Ming Fei!
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One night, Gu Lan announced Gu Yan that she was pregnant.
He happily kissed her and asked if she wanted to get married.
They had a little marriage with only their friends and their close family.
It became known that she was cured by her husband and the Patriarch of the Gu Clan came with a group of elders to propose her to become an elder of the clan.
She revealed her cultivation of Stage-3 Martial Ancestor and said that she didn't care about the clan matters.
While most of the people within the Gu Clan were celebrating that the seventh Martial Ancestor of the sect was from their clan, their elders knew the bitter truth.
With her cultivation, it was possible that she was the one who poisoned Gu Yu to take her revenge on him.
They thought that she was waiting for Gu Heng to become a Dao of Dragon expert before punishing him as well.
Even if they knew what would happen, they could only gloomily accept it.
She was now one of the pillars of the sect, she had the right to take revenge on the one who poisoned her, whoever it was!
Furthermore, they still had to be thankful that she didn't reveal the truth to the public.
If people knew what Gu Heng did to a future Martial Ancestor and how he was left unpunished, they would become the most hated people of the sect!
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With all of the Spiritual Stones accumulated in the two high-grade Deity Lakes, he managed to exchange enough Gold Spiritual Stone Essences to reach the peak of Stage-9 Martial Ancestor.
Since Gu Bei was his brother-in-law, he decided to help him.
He personally trained him, just like how Long Yan was doing with Long Yuyin but this time with a sword.
As he thought of the future, Gu Yan knew that the three low-grade Deity Lakes controlled by Gu Heng were not enough for the successor of the Gu Clan.
He decided to capture some unmanned ones and to gift them to his brother-in-law when their enemy would be totally crushed.
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By the location of the Deity Lakes owned by Li Xingyun, Gu Yan managed to pinpoint the middle-grade one that Nie Li took the Deity Root from in the story.
After defeating the demon beasts and taking the accumulated Spiritual Stones in the lake, he told Gu Long to send some troops to guard his new lake.
When Gu Yan told Gu Long to make some teams of Heavenly-Axis experts to explore the outside world to find unexplored ruins or unmanned Deity Lakes, the latter told him that he already knew of a middle-grade one.
Apparently, before meeting Gu Yan he was waiting for his breakthrough to the Dao of Dragon Realm to form his own force and to take the unmanned Deity Lake for himself.