The person is as old as his heart has aged
Wearing a Gu Master’s uniform he rarely puts on, Gu Yue Dong Tu waits for Fang Yuan and privately credits his nephew’s speed at only C grade aptitude mostly to the Liquor worm, though the faint smile on Fang Yuan’s approaching face chills him. Dong Tu opens by recounting his own youth: becoming a Gu Master at fifteen with B grade aptitude, reaching rank two initial stage at sixteen, upper stage at seventeen, and peak stage at eighteen, and believing at nineteen that he would be rank three by twenty, until a Xiong village Gu Master nearly killed him that same year and a medicine hall elder’s rescue left his aptitude dropped to C grade, a shock he says took him eight full years to recover from. He says that at twenty nine he began to see that a lone person’s strength is limited next to one’s connections, that he started his life anew at thirty, stepped down from active missions at forty five, was petitioned for an elder’s seat dozens of times though his own cultivation never passed rank two peak stage, and that clansmen now call him the hidden elder. ch. 101
Dong Tu tells Fang Yuan he is young and arrogant just as his uncle once was, that no group will take him, and that he should give up on the family inheritance mission; Fang Yuan listens in silence, privately amused at what his uncle would think if he knew of his five hundred years of memory, and recognizes that Dong Tu’s own trust in connections over solitary strength was once his own belief in his previous life, before he built the Bloodwing Demon Sect on it, and before reaching rank six showed him that a great following is as much a burden as a help and that only oneself can truly be relied on. He privately judges his uncle both a success, for building a comfortable and lasting place after his fall, and a coward, for choosing that path only after one setback broke him. ch. 101
Taking Fang Yuan’s silence for absorption in his words, Dong Tu offers him a thousand primeval stones and the use of his connections if he drops his claim to the family assets, and notes pointedly that Fang Yuan is already two days late paying his rent; Fang Yuan instead observes that his uncle’s uniform is too clean for a working Gu Master’s and tells him plainly that his comfortable years have worn away his old ambition, so that he now fights for the family assets only to protect an easy life. Enraged at being lectured in turn, Dong Tu claims he already knows the contents of the family inheritance mission and dares Fang Yuan to complete it, and Fang Yuan draws out the bullskin water sack of golden honey wine and asks what it holds, leaving Dong Tu pale with shock, since he had arranged to hear the moment Fang Yuan sought outside help. ch. 101
Panicked, Dong Tu chases after Fang Yuan and raises his offer first to two thousand and then to two thousand five hundred primeval stones, then threatens him with losing an arm or a leg if he keeps refusing, but Fang Yuan reasons that a man too bound by rule and fear to simply seize the water sack within his own reach was never going to stop him, and feels no hatred for his uncle, since he would not even be pursuing the family assets if his primeval stones were not already so thin. Fang Yuan walks into the internal affairs hall without answering, and Dong Tu is left outside shaking with rage as the setting sun lights the white already showing in his hair, aged, the narration notes, since the injury that broke him at twenty. ch. 101
