What is that?
Since Yi Tian Mountain, Fang Yuan has tested this body without Gu worms: fast, strong and hard to injure, all of it from dao marks. Inside Reverse Flow River no Gu Immortal can use Gu worms at all, so his body and its dao marks give him an edge here. Excited, he swims on chasing Ying Wu Xie. He rests on a floating plank already holding a striped tiger, and when it starts sinking he crushes the attacking tiger’s head with one punch. It is only an ordinary beast; a desolate beast would overwhelm even the sovereign immortal body, but Snowy Mountain blessed land has no shortage of them and their owners keep them inside immortal apertures rather than let enemies kill them. ch. 1272
Not knowing Purple Mountain True Monarch has awakened, he still takes Old Ancestor Xue Hu for the chief threat, reasoning Ying Wu Xie’s tie to Snowy Mountain cannot be close since Xue Hu never helped at Yi Tian Mountain. The guess is sound; his thin information path intelligence simply cannot take him further. He judges he could now survive even meeting Xue Hu, and worries missing this chance would definitely let Ying Wu Xie’s group grow rapidly under Xue Hu’s protection. Swimming on, he finds Bi Chen Tian, a badly injured Central Continent rank eight Gu Immortal resting on a huge turtle, hurt in an earlier fight, not the river, and unable to heal since the collapse swept him away. ch. 1272
Bi Chen Tian does not recognize him. Fang Yuan wears the sovereign immortal body’s own face, and that body takes the aura of whichever region it crosses, so its Northern Plains aura leaves Bi Chen Tian wary of a stranger who might secretly serve Xue Hu. Since neither can use Gu worms here, both keep their distance. Any Gu Immortal’s accumulated dao marks, like a Gu Master’s from black boar Gu, still work on the body even where the worm itself cannot act, so Fang Yuan respects his deep foundation and has no wish to fight yet. Fang Yuan asks whether he is a Central Continent Gu Immortal, then offers himself as a Northern Plains Gu Immortal with a grudge who tried to break in and stop Xue Hu refining a rank eight Immortal Gu. Probed on whether he aids that refinement, Bi Chen Tian eases, since he too had fought Xue Hu inside Snowy Mountain before the collapse, and every injury came from that fight. ch. 1272
The two trade only guarded information, since neither trusts the other, so Fang Yuan gives up and leaves, uninvited to rest on the turtle. A soft, fist-sized, jellyfish-like thing washes down the river and sticks to his forehead. Startled, Fang Yuan moves to pull it off, but Bi Chen Tian calls out for him to be gentle and not crush it, and Fang Yuan wonders what could make a rank eight Gu Immortal so anxious. ch. 1272
