Chainsaw Golden Centipede
Waking near noon the next day, Fang Yuan finds the pain gone and his new ear indistinguishable from any other, and testing the Earth Communication Ear Grass with a trickle of red steel primeval essence, he watches roots grow from his ear in the mirror as his hearing sharpens enough to catch footsteps as though he stood on bare earth, then lets it lapse and watches the roots retract and his ear settle back to normal. He disposes of the previous night’s evidence, a basin of bloody water now blackened past recognition by a lump of coal, no different from the dirty stove water many clansmen produce as summer nears. ch. 129
Returning to the rock crack cave with a bound deerling in tow, Fang Yuan activates the Earth Communication Ear Grass before opening the stone door, first picking out the slow heartbeats of sleeping stone monkeys in the rock forest, then rooting the grass into the door itself to catch the confused, frequent noise stirring beyond it. He pushes the heavy door open with his own strength, unties the deerling, wounds it lightly with a small moonblade to drive it forward, and watches the tunnel’s darkness swallow it. ch. 129
Rooting the grass into the tunnel walls this time, his hearing amplified to a three hundred step radius, Fang Yuan tracks the deerling’s cries as a swarm of centipedes overwhelms and kills it, then picks out a buzzing like a running chainsaw among the noise, and from that sound alone identifies a rank three wild Gu worm, the Chainsaw Golden Centipede, the true killer of the cave. He pictures it, based on the sound, as over a metre long and as thick as two fists, with rows of saw toothed edges along its sides that it uses to grind the deerling’s bones to powder once the ordinary centipedes clear a path before it. ch. 129
Judging that even his White Jade Gu could not survive the Chainsaw Golden Centipede’s attack, and reading the Flower Wine Monk’s intent as meaning for him to use the Earth Communication Ear Grass to avoid the centipede rather than fight it, Fang Yuan reasons that his Spring Autumn Cicada, whose aura cows Gu worms of rank one through four but weakens against rank five and has no effect on another rank six, gives him a real chance to subdue it once he is ready. At only rank two middle stage himself, he judges subduing a rank three Gu worm possible but premature for now, and estimating that the alarmed centipede colony will need ten days to half a month to settle, he seals the stone door again and leaves the way he came. ch. 129
