Chapter 126

Fang Yuan’s blunt admission of defeat draws scorn from the crowd, who call him a coward tarnishing the clan, and several Gu Yue Gu Masters press him to fight anyway; Fang Yuan stays indifferent, privately dismissing reputation as a leash used to bind people to the clan’s own values, and the crowd steps back until no one stands within five paces of him. He reasons that others reject him because his contempt for their values threatens their own faith in those values, but that he needs the isolation regardless, carrying too many secrets to keep close company; from his previous life he recalls that Qing Mao Mountain’s three villages barely survive this wolf tide only to be entirely destroyed by a disaster two years later, and that his true aim is to grow strong enough here to leave the clan before that fate arrives. ^{ch. 126}

Gu Yue Qing Shu steps in for the clan instead, offering Xiong Li a contest of strength: if Xiong Li can break free of a green vine grown from his palm, Qing Shu will concede. Confident in the combined strength of two bears he credits to the Brown Bear Innate Strength Gu and the Grand Bear Gu, Xiong Li agrees, and Qing Shu’s two vines coil a dozen times around his arms and pin them to his back. ^{ch. 126}

Xiong Li’s strength snaps the vines at first, but Qing Shu’s vines then darken, thicken, sprout broad leaves, and regrow across the breaks with more than ten times their earlier binding strength; even after Xiong Li invokes the Grand Bear Gu’s own two-bear strength, he manages to snap only one vine before conceding the match outright, to the loud praise of the watching Gu Yue Gu Masters, Fang Zheng among them. ^{ch. 126}

Fang Yuan recognizes the display as the Wood Charm Gu from the pair of emerald leaves grown in Qing Shu’s hair, a Gu that lets its user embody a tree spirit and draw natural essence from the air to replenish primeval essence even mid-battle, amplifying Gu such as the Green Vine Gu and Pine Needle Gu and letting its user fight as much as three times longer through the continuous replenishment; he reasons through its costly advancement, rarely pursued, in which the rank three Wood Charm Gu fuses with a hundred-years Lifespan Gu into a rank four hundred-years Wood Charm Gu and that in turn with a thousand-years Lifespan Gu into a rank five thousand-years Wood Charm Gu, when a hundred-years Lifespan Gu could instead simply add a hundred years and a thousand-years Lifespan Gu a thousand years to a Gu Master’s own capped hundred-year human lifespan. In his previous life Fang Yuan used a five-hundred-years Lifespan Gu to stretch his own hundred years into six hundred, only to die partway through by self-detonation under attack from the righteous factions; he further recalls that prolonged use of the Wood Charm Gu turns its user’s body to wood, a fate that killed Gu Yue Qing Shu in that previous life, and notes that Xiong Jiang’s Roaming Zombie Gu carries a similar risk, best paired with a Bloodline Gu or its user’s own blood drains away into true zombification. ^{ch. 126}

Back at their camp, the Xiong Li group still draws applause for the win over Bai Bing Yi despite the loss to Qing Shu, and the alliance slope turns chaotic as more challenges break out across the field, Mo Yan among those who accept one, against Xiong Jiao Man, as the true Gu battle begins. ^{ch. 126}