"Sure thing," Guo Lian said, seemingly oblivious to Thieving Heaven's threats. He turned towards Fang Yuan. "Hey, I'm Guo Lian. My hobbies include... well, I don't really have any. I just like lounging around doing nothing most of the time, but my clan members aren't really receptive to that. Who are you?"

"You already know my name," Fang Yuan said.

"Yeah, but I don't know anything about you."

"You don't need to know anything about me," Fang Yuan said.

"He comes from a different time period anyway, and you'll never meet him again," Thieving Heaven said.

"Oh, are you like from the future then?" Guo Lian said. "Hey, tell me, do I manage to finally become the great Venerable in the future? Is my name famous throughout all the five regions?"

"I have never heard of your name before," Fang Yuan admitted. He had a high suspicion that this person likely died without accomplishing anything of significance. He had never even heard of this person's clan, meaning they were also very insignificant.

"Ah, bummer," Guo Lian said. However, he didn't think about rage quitting again. Instead, he said, "But you know what? Maybe with that aptitude-raising Gu, I might actually accomplish something. Whatever. If you guys want to see this little thing I figured out, we should all sit down." He pulled out a table and three chairs from a storage-type gu worm in his aperture. Fang Yuan took a seat.

All the while, Guo Lian kept blabbering about random things, even while he was showing them this new technique that he had discovered. Fang Yuan thought inwardly that he was far too trusting especially for an Otherworldly Demon. This world was far more dangerous than whatever world he had come from, clearly.

"Oh, hey, do you like poetry?" Guo Lian asked Fang Yuan. "Because I happened to make my own poem. You want to hear it?"

Neither of them wanted to, but that didn't stop Guo Lian:

"In the meme-filled depths of the Internet's haze,

Where emojis dance and trends ablaze,

There's a tale of a vibe that's so on fleek,

With swag and chill, it's the language we speak.

On Insta feeds where selfies pop,

And Tiktoks tick like a Ticktock clock,

We flex our fits, no cap, no lie

With skibidi toilets and that drip so fly.

But deep in the DMs, hearts can yearn,

For a friend to stan and lessons to learn,

We spill the tea and spill it fast,

With squad goals tight, we'll always last.

So slide into my DMs, fam, let's chat,

From memes to dreams, we'll laugh like that,

In this digital world where we all vibe,

We'll slay the day, our spirits thrive."

Fang Yuan: ...

THDV: ...

"So what do you guys think? I was going to call my poem 'Sigma Rizz' - wait, you guys don't know what either of those things mean, do you, well, the word 'sigma' is derived from the ordinary hierarchy seen in wolves with the 'alpha' being..." Guo Lian kept yapping while Fang Yuan felt like he had a headache. Thieving Heaven felt like he had suddenly taken damage from some kind of wisdom path attack, even though once again that should have been impossible given the difference in rank.

'Perhaps I was too harsh when I was telling Fang Zheng he had no talent for poems,' Fang Yuan thought.

"Oh hey look at that - I refined that gu worm again!" Guo Lian said, removing another Stupidity Gu from his aperture.

"Okay, for the last time, enough nonsense," Thieving Heaven said through gritted teeth. "Show us what it is that you managed to discover."

"Right, so. We all come from a different world, right?" Guo Lian said. "So there's something different about us compared to the rest of the people around the world."

"Yes, it's called having Otherworldly Dao marks," Thieving Heaven said.

"What are Dao marks?" Guo Lian asked.

"Just forget I said anything," Thieving Heaven said, waving his hand, not wanting this meeting to become any more sidetracked than it already was.

Fang Yuan had never heard of Otherworldly Dao marks before. He also didn't want to disturb whatever sort of lesson was going on here just to ask some random question so he kept quiet for now.

"So you can take some of that stuff that we have, which is unique, and put them in gu worms like this." He took out a gu that Fang Yuan was familiar with: an Equality Gu, but this was only Rank 2. Guo Lian then took one primordial stone and placed it on the other end of the scale, where normally another Gu Master would place their hand.

"The thing is, even though our bodies have this sort of weird thing because we're from a different world, gu worms don't have that, because they're all born in this world. I don't think either of your worlds had gu worms, did they?"

Both Fang Yuan and Thieving Heaven shook their heads.

"However, there is one place where this difference between us and gu worms actually meet together," Guo Lian said. "That's in our Vital Gu. Because our Vital Gu are parts of ourselves in a way, we can try to combine them with this part of us from another world."

Both Fang Yuan and Thieving Heaven didn't really seem to get what was going on, so Guo Lian decided to demonstrate.

"So, what you need to do is you keep one primordial stone on the other end of Equality Gu and you put your hand on the other side. Then you focus on your own Vital Gu and you try to see if you can transfer this sort of otherworldly... I guess what you were saying, dao marks, between you and that gu. If you do it right, the primordial stone will then start to develop a new kind of gu worm. Here, let me show you."

Guo Lian began pouring his primordial essence into Equality Gu, with the primordial stone seemingly remaining unchanged. After 10 minutes, nothing had happened. "Yeah, this thing takes a bit of time," Guo Lian said. "I've been trying to see if I can do it faster, but I really can't."

After half an hour, both Fang Yuan and Thieving Heaven felt that nothing was going to happen, but then the primordial stone did start to change. It started dissolving, but not in the way that a primordial stone normally would.

Instead, it was shedding its outer layers until it revealed a strange shape, as if a sculptor was carving something out of it. A few hours later, Guo Lian was done, and the primordial stone had turned into the shape of his vital Gu. A while later, and it had completely come to life, fluttering its wings.

"So, this is how I can make what I call 'Rank 0 Gu'," Guo Lian said.

'Rank 0 Gu?' Fang Yuan wondered. He had never seen anything like that. He went over and reached for this Rank 0 Gu and picked it up. On closer inspection, it looked like it was slightly deformed. One of its eyes was bigger than the other. Its wings were not symmetrical, and it had an odd number of legs: four legs on one side and three on the other.

It was as if someone had tried to make the Gu worm from memory, but they were not very good at replicating it. It also had a faded-out appearance, as if the color had been bleached out from it. As for its aura, Fang Yuan could not sense any aura from it. It was as if it lacked it completely. However, simultaneously, it did seem to have the properties of a gu and was not an ordinary insect.