Hunting down
Bai Ning Bing declares he will restrict himself to rank two strength for a “fair fight,” and Fang Yuan takes off running, leading him straight into the valley’s wolf pack, which turns on both newcomers at once. Fang Yuan pushes through the wolves shielded by a white jade light and the combined strength of two boars, while Bai Ning Bing’s water-vapour barrier, though it disperses the wolves’ momentum, cannot open him a path the way Fang Yuan’s greater physical strength can, so the two begin to fall apart from one another. ch. 134
When a bold lightning wolf singles out Fang Yuan, he vanishes from Bai Ning Bing’s sight entirely, and the wolf redirects its charge at Bai Ning Bing instead, delighting him. Spinning his ice blade into a blizzard storm, Bai Ning Bing shreds most of the surrounding pack, and though the charging bold lightning wolf shatters part of the blade on impact, it dies with the blade’s remnant through its heart; he then heals the blade whole again with a touch of his own icy mist. The four surviving Gu Masters of the trapped group, Gu Yue Man Shi among them, rush to thank Bai Ning Bing as their savior, and he answers by cutting down three of them without warning, leaving only Man Shi standing. ch. 134
Man Shi, who once lost to Bai Ning Bing and was spared, now accuses him of murdering Gu Yue clansmen in violation of the three clans’ alliance treaty and charges at him with the Monolith Gu’s rock-skin transformation active. Bai Ning Bing kills him too, an ice blade strike carving through his head and down past his chest before shattering on the stone-hard skin, the frost finishing what the blade did not, and afterward barely recalls having spared this same man before. ch. 134
Bai Ning Bing then calls out that he has killed the Gu Masters Fang Yuan wanted dead and demands a life-and-death match, and when Fang Yuan appears he attacks at once, only for Fang Yuan to flee again, drawing him toward the nearest other battlefield, where Xiong Li’s group is fighting off a separate wolf pack that Fang Yuan lured in the same way. Xiong Li, still furious over an earlier ambush in which Bai Ning Bing suppressed himself to rank two and beat him anyway, and Xiong Lin, who notices Bai Ning Bing chasing Fang Yuan, both hesitate to intervene in what looks like an outsider’s quarrel, until Fang Yuan closes the distance and shouts that Bai Ning Bing is trying to eliminate all witnesses after being seen with the Plunder Gu, turning their hesitation into alarm. ch. 134
