Fang Yuan sighed. He had hoped that the humans within his immortal aperture would be able to handle the Jade Eye Stone Monkeys on their own. While these monkeys were not incredibly powerful, they could not be defeated using ordinary mortal tactics without incurring heavy losses.
Ideally, a strong Gu Master would have stepped forward to slaughter them.
However, herein lay the problem: there were no strong Gu Masters within his Fang Yuan Continent!
What had started out as a fringe movement - or at least, he had thought of it as a fringe movement at the time - the anti-Gu Master sentiment - had turned into one of the greatest powers on the Fang Yuan Continent.
They now consisted of over three thousand people, becoming the largest surface-dwelling tribe on Fang Yuan Continent. These people not only shunned Gu Master Cultivation, but actively went against it!
They had destroyed several gu worms in the area they were living in. No Gu Masters were allowed in the tribe, and whenever they happened to take over an area, they would eject whatever Gu Masters were there, take whatever food was needed to feed their gu worms, and seize that person's primeval stones.
If the Gu Master resisted, they would be beaten to death by the mob.
Wherever this tribe found a pocket of Hope Gu - they would immediately kill it! No Gu Masters were allowed to develop - that had become a cornerstone of their philosophy!
Because of this tribe the main area of the continent had become devoid of cultivators.
Fang Yuan gnashed his teeth in frustration as he watched the Ambition Gu he had rained down upon them go to waste as they were killed by this strange tribe.
'Are these humans stupid?' he wondered. This anti-cultivation sentiment was spreading like a plague to surrounding tribes. Any Gu Master among them now hid their identity in fear.
If anyone in the outside Gu World saw the state of this continent, they would laugh or simply refuse to believe that such a place existed.
After all, Gu Masters were the apex of the world.
However, in his aperture, things were different.
The mortals felt there was no need for Gu Masters. After all, Gu Masters did not have an inherent advantage in lifespan without Lifespan Gu - and any Lifespan Gu that appeared in the aperture was immediately seized by Fang Yuan for his own use. Seeing no path to longevity, many people had given up on cultivation entirely.
Even if Fang Yuan wanted to indirectly urge them to eliminate the Jade Eye Stone Monkeys, they lacked the strength to do so easily.
He felt a sudden urge to descend into his aperture and give these mortals a few slaps for being so foolish. When he had first transmigrated into this world, he had been fascinated by the ability to cultivate; yet here these people were, shunning it willingly. It was an incredibly myopic way of thinking that would no doubt bite them in the back later on.
Perhaps if people on Earth suddenly got the ability to cultivate the ordinary people there would treat cultivators with the same fear and suppression, he mused.
"Quickly! Make sure there are no Gu Masters around!"
"We all stand for equality! Gu Master Cultivation makes people unequal!"
"Indeed, how can we live in peace if there is someone next door who can wipe out tens of people with a flick of their wrist?"
"Make sure we destroy any Hope Gu we happen to come across!"
"Look over there - that person is using weird powers!"
"How dare he!"
"Gu Masters are so odd - I do not like them!"
"I bet he thinks that he's better than us ordinary people."
"How dare he feel superior! Beat him up until he learns his lesson!"
The mortals were trying to suppress Gu Masters before the Gu Masters could turn around and suppress them. From their point of view, the logic was clear - but Fang Yuan could not stand for it. Ultimately, as his aperture expanded, he needed to nurture Gu Immortal seeds to have Rank 6 subordinates working for him. If all Gu Masters were suppressed at the root, his plans would stall.
Thankfully they hadn't contaminated any of the primeval springs as of yet, which was a small silver lining, but even if they did so because of the constraints of watching the Integration Formation develop he would just have to wait and watch on the sidelines.
Was this really how humanity was meant to develop? Or would have developed?
He would've normally introduced wild beasts into Fang Yuan Continent to show the people the need to get stronger, but he had already introduced the Jade Eye Stone Monkeys and look at how that had turned out...
No, he couldn't do anything further that was drastic to change the affairs of things.
However, even as he lamented the state of the people within Fang Yuan Continent, something began to change among the Jade Eye Stone Monkeys.
Fang Yuan noticed that the monkeys had suddenly started turning against each other!
Old rivalries broke out as a desperate power struggle ensued over who would be the next Beast King. The Jade Eye Stone Monkeys began attacking one another and destroying each other's homes.
Tension also flared between the monkeys who had tentatively sided with the humans and those who were more rebellious.
Those monkeys considered "guilty" of aiding the humans a bit too much were the first to be slaughtered by their own kin.
Since no Hundred Beast King had emerged yet, the internal war was a bloody battle of numbers.
The surviving Jade Eye Stone monkeys were left nursing their wounds, desperately trying to rebuild what they had destroyed.
All in all, only about a third of them were left alive.
This would still pose a problem in the future, Fang Yuan noted, though the issue had somewhat resolved itself by thinning out the herd.
Ultimately, Fang Yuan chose to deal with the problem by removing the Jade Eye Stone Monkeys himself. He had interfered by putting them there in the first place, and also interfered by taking them out - but something had to be done. And soon.
This left an area that was uninhabited in the Fang Yuan Continent, which would be overtaken by some tribe or the other at some point.
As for the monkeys themselves, they were not numerous enough to be sold on Yellow Treasure Heaven. It would cost more via the transaction fee to trade them around, so Fang Yuan placed them in Black Heaven for now and was going to get rid of them somewhere outside.
With this matter dealt with, Fang Yuan now turned his attention to unraveling the secrets of the Formation Path in the mortal inheritance he had been granted.
Fang Yuan had not been fortuitous enough to find anything like that even in his past life, and so when he began delving into it, he found himself quickly lost, frowning.
This was far more complicated than he had initially thought.
His attainment levels in various aspects gave him an advantage over someone just starting out, but also, Fang Yuan was not interested in a formation with only a few dozen gu worms. He intended to create a large formation in order to stimulate the Emotion Lillies, and that would have to involve hundreds of gu worms.
He quickly began to realize just how difficult of a task that would be.
'Hmm... there is a premade formation mentioned here...' Fang Yuan noted, his eyes lighting up. Rather than starting from the ground up, he could go ahead and modify an exiting formation. That would certainly increase the odds of him succeeding.
This formation in question was designed to stimulate the growth of plants - though this was for ordinary plants and as such depended mainly on Earth Path and Wood Path mastery. Fang Yuan had some foundation in the Earth Path, and decided to attempt using his Emotion Path foundation in order to alter the Wood Path gu worms to create something that he thought might work.
Fang Yuan still took several hours carefully inspecting the various gu worms before he arranged them in a massive formation consisting of several thousand mortal gu worms.
The moment after he arranged them, the formation collapsed, ten percent of the gu worms dying, and Fang Yuan feeling a headache as he suffered from backlash!