Chapter 100

Ten more days pass, and deep in the stone forest Fang Yuan now stands his ground against a swarm of jade eye stone monkeys, their claws and bites only ringing off him, and finds the new White Jade Gu’s light, though thinner looking than the old Jade Skin Gu’s green glow, carries more than double its defense: where Jade Skin Gu could hold against at most sixteen monkeys attacking at once, White Jade Gu lets him face down more than thirty. He notes that White Jade Gu draws on his primeval essence the same way Jade Skin Gu did, spending more as an attack grows harder, and reflects that this is a defense his own bare fists, which once broke through Fang Zheng’s Jade Skin Gu on the arena, could never break. ^{ch. 100}

Pushing toward a wide central stone pillar he believes hides the inheritance’s next clue, Fang Yuan draws the alarm of monkeys whose caves grow more crowded the deeper he goes, and a hundred stone monkeys pour out at him at once; he flees until the chase thins to some thirty, turns to fight them off, and across several such rounds kills over a hundred stone monkeys before his primeval essence runs low and he retreats to the inheritance’s second secret room. There he pours the day’s haul of eyeball jades into a small bag already holding hundreds more, sets aside a bag of wild boar tusks he no longer needs since White Jade Gu ended his use for White Boar Gu’s pork, and notes that White Jade Gu instead eats jade rock, eight liang every twenty days against Jade Skin Gu’s two liang every ten, a heavier average cost that the stone forest’s plentiful jade rock easily covers. ^{ch. 100}

With only two and a half primeval stones left and a water sack of hard won golden honey wine in hand, Fang Yuan sets out for the internal affairs hall at sunset, taking a roundabout route to keep the rock crack hidden, and reflects that as a rank two Gu Master he can now move through the village freely by day, with the sickly snake group’s deaths having also freed him of teammates, even as his tarnished reputation makes joining a new group unlikely and the clan’s mandatory monthly mission still needs completing. On the crowded street a girl chasing a spinning top stumbles into his leg, and her terrified father kowtows and moves to strike her until Fang Yuan stops his hand and gently reassures the crying girl before continuing on to his rented house, where he finds his uncle Gu Yue Dong Tu waiting for him some distance away. ^{ch. 100}