Chapter 109

News that the newcomer Fang Yuan has beaten the established Gu Yue Man Shi spreads fast among the clan’s rank two Gu Masters, who already know both men by reputation: Man Shi as one of the few to survive an encounter with Bai Ningbing, Fang Yuan as the year’s academy champion who beat Fang Zheng and inherited a sudden fortune. Opinion calls the sudden, wordless attack reckless, and gossip claims Man Shi will need at least three days in bed to recover, but the shared clan view holds that only the result counts in a world this dangerous, so the loss alone is enough to cost Man Shi his standing as group leader once he recovers. ^{ch. 109}

The defeat also settles the standoff with Fang Yuan’s uncle Gu Yue Dong Tu, who had already stopped using Fang Zheng against Fang Yuan after Gu Yue Qing Shu’s warning but had kept paying other Gu Masters, Man Shi among them, to make trouble at Fang Yuan’s properties; with that scheme now humiliated in public, Dong Tu drops it for good, aware that the bamboo houses, wine tavern, and Nine Leaves Vitality Grass he lost to Fang Yuan leave him no income to replace the primeval stones already spent, while Fang Yuan’s own take from those same assets keeps growing. ^{ch. 109}

Business at the tavern recovers just as the caravan arrives early, in March instead of its usual summer season and noticeably larger than before; Fang Yuan traces the change to his own killing of Jia Jin Sheng, which left surviving brother Jia Fu wrongly convinced that rival Jia Gui was behind it, driving the two brothers into a public fight that left Jia Fu scarred and pushed them into racing to reach the clans first, even before that year’s snow had fully melted. ^{ch. 109}

Clan leader Gu Yue Bo receives Jia Fu warmly, inviting him to attend the clan’s Awakening Ceremony, held two days later, as an honored guest, and Jia Fu in turn asks permission for investigators he has brought to look into Jia Jin Sheng’s death, a request Gu Yue Bo agrees to accommodate. Touring the encampment, Fang Yuan finds this caravan larger than usual, with more tents and, unusually for a mid-scale operation, a Gu house built from an eighteen-meter-tall three star cave tree holding three floors of counters, where he spots a Liquor worm already drawing a crowd of admiring bidders, and judges that Jia Fu, having been thoroughly provoked back at the clan, is now making an all-out push at Qing Mao Mountain. ^{ch. 109}